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Cook Islands saga another test for Govt's China policy as Luxon hits Beijing
Cook Islands saga another test for Govt's China policy as Luxon hits Beijing

Newsroom

time11 hours ago

  • Business
  • Newsroom

Cook Islands saga another test for Govt's China policy as Luxon hits Beijing

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says the 'areas of risk' in the strategic deal between the Cook Islands and China include security, defence, sovereignty and international border arrangements. These risk factors are now being worked through by officials from the two countries, and the Cook Islands foreign ministry says a new Formal Dialogue Mechanism has been set up to assess the agreement and identify risk mitigation. While a statement from the Cook Islands on Thursday says officials met in April and May, on Thursday the Cook Islands News revealed the New Zealand Government had pulled more than $18 million of development aid to the Pacific country on June 4. The timing could not have been much more awkward for the Prime Minister. The news dropped the same day Luxon held his first political talks in China, and on the eve of his high-stakes meetings with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang in Beijing. While Luxon went out of his way to explain this retaliation was about the NZ-Cooks relationship – not China – Foreign Minister Winston Peters singled out the superpower's role in this relationship breakdown while in France just 10 days ago. 'As partners engage with our region, it is important that they do so in a manner that is transparent and supportive of good governance. 'Not all partners take this approach. Some ask Pacific partners not to publish agreements or avoid the Forum Secretariat when organising regional engagements,' he said, going on to say that 'external pushes' in the region were looking to 'coerce, cajole and constrain'. Friday's meetings between Luxon and Xi and Li would show whose version China deemed most plausible, with the potential the topic would make its way onto the agenda for the leaders' meetings. Among the other topics of disagreement between the two countries expected to be raised on Friday were China's combat exercises in the Tasman Sea and Pacific, China's actions in the Pacific more broadly, its unlawful actions in the South China Sea and human rights. Both sides acknowledged there would always be areas where the two countries disagreed, but the relationship was mature enough to talk about these issues – as long as that was done 'predictably, consistently, publicly and privately'. While the snags in the relationship were well-traversed, those in the room would be looking for the nuance in how China spoke about certain issues to get a better read of their feelings on particular matters. Beyond geopolitical issues, both countries would also raise the importance of the trading relationship – something Luxon had emphasised during the first two days of his fleeting first visit to China. While in Shanghai, members of the business delegation accompanying the Prime Minister signed deals expected to generate $871m. China is New Zealand's largest trading partner and two-way trade was worth $39 billion. But New Zealand exports accounted for just 0.3 percent of China's imports. 'So we just need a little bit more and we're doing exceptionally well for ourselves,' Luxon said. During Luxon's first political meeting with Shanghai Party Secretary Chen Jining, both sides emphasised the strong trading relationship in their opening remarks. The PM in his first major political meeting of the tour, with Shanghai party secretary Chen Jining. Photo: Pool/Thomas Manch And in the afternoon he visited Fudan University to highlight the importance of the international student market as part of his Government's growth plan. But Labour foreign policy spokesperson Phil Twyford said there was a disconnect between Luxon's security and economic policies when it came to China. 'What I'm watching with the Prime Minister's visit to Beijing is whether or not he can bring together the two straight, very divergent narrative strands on our relationship with China that he and this Government have been maintaining now for some time,' he said. 'On one hand, it's a special relationship, our most important trading partner … On the other hand, there is hardly an official foreign policy and defence document in circulation right now that doesn't basically position China as a military threat to New Zealand.' Twyford said he saw those two things as 'quite a contradiction'. China and the US have led to a pull away from the historically bipartisan approach on foreign policy, with Labour criticising the Government's stance on Aukus and questioning the state of New Zealand's foreign policy. 'I have no doubt that his Chinese hosts will be watching very carefully to try to read the Prime Minister's sense of the relationship and where New Zealand wants to go with it, but right now, I think that contradiction is a vulnerability for New Zealand's national interests.' Luxon said he disagreed with Labour's categorisation, but not before taking a swing at the party by questioning who was in charge of foreign policy: Phil Twyford, Chris Hipkins, Helen Clark? 'This is a government that's been crystal clear from day one: our economic prosperity is very much tied to our security. This is a country that wants to lift its urgency and its intensity in all of its relationships across the Indo-Pacific. 'We can do well for ourselves in the years ahead, and it requires us to build relationships at a top-to-top level and then actually have our business sectors actually engage with each other,' he said.

The Israel-Iran conflict may not end without a regime change
The Israel-Iran conflict may not end without a regime change

Newsroom

time11 hours ago

  • Politics
  • Newsroom

The Israel-Iran conflict may not end without a regime change

Analysis: The spiral of conflict in the Middle East took another dangerous turn when Israel, seemingly unprovoked, attacked Iran last Friday on an unprecedented scale, taking the region to the brink of full-scale war as Iran retaliates. The day before Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the still ongoing war, he went to the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) sacred to Jews and posted a note into a crack in the colossal stone blocks as per the ritual. The note quoted the biblical Book of Numbers: 'Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion.' Hence the name Operation Rising Lion. When I visited Jerusalem in 2023, I made it into the tunnels behind and beneath the Western Wall and saw long forgotten and faded notes scattered on the ground. My guess is that the current trajectory in the Middle East will see Netanyahu's vision for Israeli power and security cast in the dirt also. For most, the main question now is whether there is any justification or tangible reason for Israel's pre-emptive attack against Iran's suspected nuclear weapons programme. My response would be that mutual perceptions of existential crisis in Israel and Iran is driving the region deeper into crisis. To understand this, one could adopt a lens of ontological security. This means the very identity and essence of the political systems in Israel and Iran are intrinsically tied to ideologically conditioned language and behaviours without which the regimes would deflate and crash to earth like punctured hot air balloons. According to this understanding, Israel and Iran have been on a collision course since the formerly close allies parted ways 45 years ago after the Iranian revolution. Let me explain. The raison d'être of the Israeli state is to protect its citizens above all – this is perhaps the one universal principle of an otherwise diverse and increasingly politically divided nation. The more that Israelis feel threatened, the more the state's identity becomes anchored to an inflexible security paradigm willing to compromise the lives and human security of others who are perceived as a 'threat', including Palestinians and those who support them. On the Iranian side, the Islamic Republic emerged out of a popular revolution against the repressive western-aligned Pahlavi monarchy. Again, like the State of Israel the Islamic Republic immediately faced attack and isolation, which led to regression into a narrow, paranoid oligarchy with a theocratic veneer. To offset flagging internal legitimacy, the regime exaggerated the Islamic character of the state by taking up the cause of Muslim justice abroad. The Palestinian issue and anti-Israel sentiment – manifested in the Axis of Resistance alliance – came to rest at the core of the Iranian regime's identity. A senior cleric of the ruling oligarchy expressed this reality perfectly in 2013 when he stated: 'The destruction of Israel is the idea of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and is one of the pillars of the Iranian Islamic regime. We cannot claim that we have no intention of going to war with Israel.' The two core paradigms of both states are mutually reinforcing – Iran props up its internal legitimacy by proclaiming a desire to destroy the Zionist state on behalf of Muslims, and Israel commits atrocities against Muslims in its search for security for Jews. Since the 2000s, the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iranian state amplified this cycle immensely. Israel has been planning to strike Iran's nuclear programme since at least 2007. At that time Israel embarrassed the Syrian regime and its Iranian ally by effortlessly evading air defences to destroy a nuclear research facility in Northeast Syria. The Israeli Defence Force then made clear its intention and capacity to do the same in Iran. What prevented Israel were Iran's regional assets, located on Israel's borders. If Israel were to attack Iran directly, they would have faced a barrage of missiles and rockets from resistance axis allies, Hamas and other militia in Gaza, and from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Syria also posed a possible threat from the Golan. This was the Iranian regime's outer defence rim and insurance policy. This changed after the October 7, 2023 attacks. By the end of 2024, Hamas and Hezbollah were no longer able to threaten Israel as before, the Al-Assad regime was gone and the path to Tehran and the Furdow, Netanz and other nuclear facilities were wide open. If US president Donald Trump had not restrained Netanyahu in the first months of 2025, the latter may have pulled the trigger on the attack even earlier. Trump, in consultation with Gulf allies during his May visit to the Middle East, which tellingly did not include Israel, was persuaded to leverage the vulnerable Iranian state into a more favourable nuclear deal. Talks were being facilitated by the neutral Omanis in Muscat. Trump had scotched the 2013-15 deal negotiated by Barak Obama, also hosted by Oman, in 2018. The latest round of talks were due to be held in Muscat on Sunday, June 15. The Iranians relaxed their security personal protocols put in place after the assassinations of top leaders via pinpoint strikes through 2024, believing that they were safe until at least after the talks. Netanyahu sensed the opportunity and his war cabinet ordered Operation Rising Lion. (Apart from a spike in pizza deliveries to the Pentagon on the day before the attacks it remains unclear how much knowedge the US had of the operation.) Where the current conflict will lead is not clear. At this point, it seems neither the Israelis nor the Iranians can change the script. The Israeli regime will act according to an ingrained impulse to destroy anything and anyone they think poses an existential risk to the State of Israel. The Islamic Republic will continue to fire back as much as they can with missiles and inflammatory rhetoric about the final destruction of Israel. It may be that only regime change in Tehran and Jerusalem via the Iranian and Israeli peoples can arrest the cycle.

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