Red Sea alert: How NZ could be drawn into a wider Middle East conflict
Diplomacy is never easy but the new coalition government has tied itself in knots by committing defence personnel to combat Houthi rebels threatening maritime trade in the Red Sea while trying to ignore the connection to the crisis in Gaza.
New Zealand has two detachments abroad serving in critical conflicts: Ukraine, and now, a 10-nation “pop-up” alliance led by the United States to confront the Houthis in Yemen.
The government, not entirely convincingly, asks us to believe there is no connection between the scorched-earth Israeli retaliation against Hamas in Gaza for the October 7 outrages and the deployment against the Houthis. It wants to paper over the ambiguity of joining a US-led alliance against the Houthis when Washington supplies the military and diplomatic cover for the Israel attacks and refuses to back our own calls for a ceasefire.
“Any suggestion our ongoing support for maritime security in the Middle East is connected to recent developments in Israel and the Gaza Strip is wrong,” Foreign Minister Winston Peters insisted. “We are contributing to this military action for the same reason New Zealand has sent defence personnel to the Middle East for decades – we care deeply about regional security because our economic and strategic interests depend on it.”
It appears that in the transition from the Labour government through the interregnum before the coalition arrived in November, that policy shifted – going from one led by a longstanding commitment to the idea of a two-state solution in the Middle East and defence of rules-based international affairs to one more clearly determined to align forcefully with Washington.
“I want us to be in lockstep with our partners who have common interests and actually be right there with them at that time,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said in December when he signed statements with Washington on Russian cyber attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza.
It may also be the case that Peters, in his third stint as Foreign Minister, is resetting policy in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Mfat) after a series of initiatives at the United Nations to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. Those votes were in line with historical New Zealand commitments under successive governments to the two-state solution and a rules-based world order and the idea of an “independent foreign policy” which Peters is reinterpreting.
In a speech to the Wellington diplomatic corps in December, he put a different perspective on what an independent New Zealand foreign policy meant. He said it had often been “perplexing” to allies and instead talked of independent foreign “policies” plural. “We will vigorously refresh our engagement with our traditional like-minded partners – Australia, our closest friend, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom – with a focus on how we advance shared interests and address strategic challenges,” he told the diplomats.
Freedom of the seas
The decision to support the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian against the Houthi attacks by providing six NZ Defence Force staff was unilaterally announced at a chaotic Beehive news conference on January 23. Luxon stood beside Peters, who did a good impression of being deaf when asked difficult questions. A grinning Defence Minister, Judith Collins, seemed to relish the idea of being a person of action.
They made the case, which is not on its surface unreasonable, that New Zealand as a trading nation has a legitimate interest in freedom of navigation and keeping the Red Sea open. New Zealand has a long-term commitment to open seas, whether with deployments to the Gulf or its participation in freedom-of-navigation exercises in the South China Sea.