A Bit of Auckland NZ History

Some Things Have Not Changed

An adequate armed defence of New Zealand has always been a problem.  In 1873, an account of "one of the greatest calamities that ever overtook the colonies" was published in the Daily Southern Cross.  It detailed 

. . . an event productive of grave disaster to New Zealand, and destructive of the ancient prestige of England and her boasted supremacy as Sovereign of the Seas.  That event was the sudden appearance of the hostile ironclad man-of-war, the "Kaskowiski," which took possession of the British warship lying in the waters of the Waitemata, seized our principal citizens as hostages, demanded a heavy ransom for the city, and emptied the coffers of the banks of all gold and specie they contained.

The consternation which, for a time, overwhelmed the people of the Province, who were made aware of this nefarious and barbarous transaction, which is utterly at variance with the laws and practice of modern warfare, may be understood by the reader but cannot be described here.  At this moment we are under the complete domination of Russia, our own guns in our own man-of-war being pointed against the city, ready to be opened upon us at any moment that the barbarous caprice of her captors may select.  [A W Reed, Auckland: City of the Seas (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1955), p. 313.]

The news account went on for some length describing the depredations about to fall upon Auckland as a result of the hostile Russian man-of-war anchored in the Waitemata Harbour.

Few Zealand Free Loading

NZ's Strategic Military Doctrine

The NZ Government has decided to bring NZ troops home from Iraq.  This seems like a timely move.  Troops, however, will remain in Afghanistan.

The question that would immediately spring to the mind of a curious Martian would be, Why has New Zealand--that tiny wee nation which nestles up to the South Pole--been sending soldiers to Iraq?  Why would New Zealand be involved in such a strange commitment?  Does New Zealand have globalist pretensions to subdue and rule over far flung nations?

Firstly, let's review the "reason" for our military involvement in Iraq:

New Zealand has had a joint-training mission in Iraq with Australia since 2015, all part of the US-led Operation Inherent Resolve.  "The New Zealand and Australian troops at Taji have worked hard, not only to provide training, but also to ensure that the ISF are well placed to take over this commitment at Taji in the near future. The goal of any training mission is to ensure that it becomes a sustainable programme," Ardern said, noting over 42,000 troops had been trained under the scheme.

ISIS lost all territorial control in the Middle East earlier this year. New Zealand will slightly increase its annual contribution to an Iraqi stabilisation fund - up to $3 million from $2.4m prior - for the next three years.  [Stuff]

For many years New Zealand has not funded a sufficient military presence or power to defend itself.

The Shame Of It All

Free Loading Off the United States

There are few things more likely to provoke incandescent rage in the "heartland" of the United States than nations "free loading" on the United States, while criticizing the US left, right, and centre.  

One such provocation is defence.  Since the formation of NATO, the United States has effectively bankrolled the whole box and dice.  There were historical reasons for this--such as the desperate need of European nations to rebuild their infrastructure and economies shattered by World War II.  They simply did not have sufficient funds to bank roll an effective defence capability.  The emergence of the Cold War required that the Soviet Union be contained;  Europe simply could not do it, without the financial support of the United States. 

Those days, however, are long since gone.  It is way beyond reasonable expectation for Europe to continue to expect, let alone demand, that the US continue to bank roll NATO.

The Long Legacy of the Great War

Don't Panic: Crack Regiments Are On Their Way

We are in the middle of a lengthy series of memorials and remembrances in which the hundred-years-ago,  "Great War" is being remembered.  One particular exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand is developing and changing over four years to depict the successive changes and progress (and regresses) of the war through 1914-18. (New Zealand was militarily engaged in the War).  

Historian Robert Tombs provides an overview of this calamitous event--and its aftermath.

The "Great War" haunts the English and British memory as horror and futility, blundered into for incomprehensible reasons, and pursued blindly for unknown ends at unimaginable cost--750,000 lives, and money that could have paid for thousands of hostpitals and schools, and a university for every city.

Across Europe, 9 million soldiers died; one in three of all British males aged nineteen to twenty-two in 1914 were killed.  The war is taken, as in Kipling's searing lines, as condemnation of the old society, its morality and its values: "the supreme and tragic climax of Victorian cant," and "the old Lie: Dulce et deocrum est pro patria mori." ["It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland."]

Freeloading on the US Dime

It’s Long Past Time for NATO Allies 

They Need To Meet Their Defense-Spending Commitments

Jerry Hendrix
National Review Online



Chancellor Angela Merkel, campaigning at a Munich beer garden this Memorial Day weekend, certainly delighted American citizens as they paused to remember their sacred war dead, including the 236,000 men who died in Europe’s 20th-century wars. “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days,” Merkel said. “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands.” Although Merkel meekly attempted to walk her initial statement back in the face of American complaints, she clearly intended it as a forceful response to the tongue-lashing the American president, Donald J. Trump, gave alliance members regarding their low levels of defense spending during their meeting at NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels last week.

Such a statement by the German chancellor would normally be viewed with concern by members of the American foreign-policy and national-security establishments, who view the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a cornerstone of the post-war global order. But coming from Merkel, it was the height of arrogance.

Germany and the other European members of NATO have chronically underfunded the alliance for the past generation,

The World's Most Armed Camp

The "New Model" Army

Christian nations and their governments should, when it comes to defence, be focused upon defending the lives of man, woman, and child.  There are few nations which comply with this doctrine of national defence.

Switzerland is one such nation.  Angelo Codevilla provides a description of the Swiss defence doctrine--and capability.  Many would be surprised.   The Swiss army . . .

is fit for only one mission: to defeat invaders.  For this, a country of 6.7 million can generate an army of twelve divisions (the US army has ten) and has twenty-six brigades, armed with some of the world's best equipment.  Of course Swiss forces completely lack, among other things, the mobility and capacity to sustain the long supply lines that the armies of great powers possess.  But the Swiss army's civil function and military mission requires steadiness rather than mobility, teeth rather than tail.  [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 207.]

It goes without saying that the Swiss army is not set up, nor resourced to "make the world safe for democracy".

Highly Unusual Bio

Educated In the College of Life

We profess to be sick and tired of career pollies.  Many years ago, we confess that we were on the verge of getting on that particular treadmill.  How deeply thankful we are to a kind and gracious God, whose Providence led us in a much more blessed direction.

These days we have plenty of career politicians who have known no "employment" beyond being a political functionary within a party, or an actual Member of Parliament.  Those who move straight from university into politics have failed to understand that it is vital, if one is to represent constituents, to know something of life beyond the Beltway, as they say.  For some strange, unfathomable reason, career pollies all have one great, unshakeable, ideological commitment: namely, that the State is the answer to all creation's imperfections.

Here is one politician, New Zealand's new Secretary of Defence with an cv that is both colourful and unusual.

Our Most Intriguing Defence Minister Ever?

Claire Trevett
NZ Herald

Monday was a very good day for Mark Mitchell -- he was promoted to Defence Minister and his runaway dog Stig was found after five days AWOL.  Mitchell made a video for his Facebook page to mark the occasion. He spoke of the privilege and honour of being in Cabinet but spent most of the time talking about the return of Stig, a black Labrador his family had since it was a puppy in 2011.  Such is Mitchell's reverence for Dogs, he uses a capped D whenever he uses the word.

 

Mitchell, 48, is a genial, unassuming bloke who looks like a big softie. Do not be fooled. A former police Dog handler, he spent 14 years in the Police Force, dealing with the Mongrel Mob in Gisborne and getting painfully acquainted with the blade of a samurai sword in Rotorua.

More Brexit Ramifications

Secure and Safe after Brexit

Steve Hoadley
Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations
University of Auckland
NZ Herald

The potential economic damage caused by Brexit has been thoroughly deplored by policy analysts, but will Western security be equally threatened by this "seismic event"?  Will the British exit weaken Britain and Europe militarily and undermine regional security? Will European political and economic disunity embolden Russia to encroach further into Eastern Europe?  Will it make detection and prevention of Isis-promoted terrorist attacks more difficult? And will it prevent the orderly management of mass unregulated migration from Africa and the Middle East?

My answer to each of these is a qualified no.

The European Union does have its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) under the umbrella of the Lisbon Treaty of 2009. The policy obliges EU member states to earmark military assets for a Rapid Reaction Force and smaller, more agile Battle Groups.

When it exits from the EU, Britain will cease to work under the CSDP planning obligations and will terminate its financial contributions to the European Defence Agency and related institutions.

One could argue that EU defence posture will be weakened proportionately by the exit of its most potent contributor, but the CSDP is largely a political exercise; its assets are paper commitments and the EU has never deployed its flagged forces except for occasional, small-scale peacekeeping, training, and counter-piracy patrols in Africa and the Balkans.

Britain's departure should make little difference to this modest defence policy.

New Zealand's National Code

Least Armed and Most Servile

In his excellent volume, The Character of Nations, Angelo M. Codevilla has some insightful observations on how a nation's attitude to fighting and winning wars gives insight into its character.  [Angelo M. Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Books/Harper Collins Publishers, 1997).  A brief bio of the author from Wikipedia appears at the end of this piece.]

He writes:

The capacity to fight and win wars is the ultimate test of character and nothing so characterizes a people or determines its fate as the way in which it draws military power from itself.  In ancient republics, military service was synonymous with citizenship.  The ultimate political question always and everywhere is which people will risk their lives to uphold the regime.  [Op cit., p.15.]

Which people will indeed risk their lives to defend New Zealand, or any nation for that matter?  In our case, the answer is clear.

Common Bonds and the Anglosphere

Our Dirty Little Secret

A correspondent, Liam Hehir, writing in the Manawatu Standard, attempts a rationale as to why New Zealand should be actively involved in the Western military effort against ISIS.  It is because of a shared cultural traditions enjoyed by the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  He defines some key aspects of this shared culture.

As it is with families, so it is with nations and there is a natural affinity between those countries that share a Britannic inheritance. Winston Churchill spoke of the common bonds of the "English speaking peoples". New Zealand historian James Belich has written of it as the "Anglo-World". The term that seems to be vogue now is the "Anglosphere". . . .

This closeness is not based on race. An Italian American has little ancestry in common with a British Pakistani or an Australian Aborigine. There is no such thing as a "Canadian" or "New Zealand" ethnicity. Our familiarity is instead bound up in shared traditions like the common law, habeas corpus, trial by jury, free enterprise, private property, freedom of speech and, of course, the English language.

Hehir neglects to mention that the two dominant members of the Anglosphere, the UK and the US, also have a long tradition of colonialism and neo-colonialism respectively.   This tradition we in NZ, but also Canada and Australia do not share--at least not to the same degree.  It is those traditions which have led both the UK and the US off to war, repeatedly.

Club Memberships Must be Paid

Second Rate Kabuki Theatre

It seems inevitable that New Zealand will be off on another military adventure to the other side of the world because . . . because . . . because it's inevitable, that's why.

We were cynically amused the other day when some folk (a politician and a few odd bloggers) were offended when a member of Britain's ruling class urbanely suggested that New Zealand needs to send troops to combat ISIS because it belongs to a club.

Mr Dunne also launched a stinging attack on comments made in New Zealand last week by British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond when he said: "Frankly we've got used to New Zealand being there alongside us, alongside the US, the UK, Australia, as part of the family." . . . .  Mr Dunne, a minister and the leader of United Future, described Mr Hammond as a "patronising figure from abroad loftily telling us we are in the club, we are part of the family and it would be lovely to have you along for the next round of unmitigated slaughter".

But the British Foreign Secretary was telling the truth.

Global Freeloaders

The Follies of New Zealand's "Defence" Policies

New Zealand's history as a non-aligned nation lasted about a nano-second--and even then existed only in the imaginations of a few peace-niks.  New Zealand has never been non-aligned.  It has always relied upon other nations to defend itself.  Relying upon other nations requires alignment.

Our unwillingness to take responsibility for the defence of the country is one of the most shameful aspects of our national life.  Relying upon other nations to come to our defence if attacked is a dereliction of fundamental government responsibilities; it also is an indictment upon the citizenry.  We are global free-loaders.

New Zealanders and their politicians maintain an unjustified pride in the false narrative that we "punch above our weight" in global affairs.  We don't.  The most fundamental duty of a state government is that it defend its citizens against armed aggression from other states and random malefactors.  In this sacred duty, successive New Zealand governments have failed.  Instead we have chosen the cheap option--all the while congratulating ourselves on how clever and cunning we have been. 

For well over a century or more, New Zealand has relied upon "others" to defend our shores.  Ironically this has resulted in our soldiers and military going to war to assist other nations--with which we have become aligned by means of mutual defence treaties.