Vol. 75/No. 33      September 19, 2011

The combat was the third lethal battle this year in Kabul involving New Zealand’s SAS forces. The SAS began missions in Afghanistan in 2001 under the Labour Party government of Helen Clark. This latest deployment has already been extended until March 2012, and Key does not rule out a further extension. The New Zealand government has also deployed 140 regular troops to Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Province.

New Zealand’s armed forces are also stepping up collaboration with their U.S. counterparts in the Pacific and elsewhere. Wellington’s alliance with Washington will be commemorated in 2012, when U.S. Marines will mark the stationing of U.S. troops here during the 1941-45 interimperialist war with Japan.

The visit will be “highly symbolic,” noted the Dominion Post’s political editor Tracy Watkins, since “the US and New Zealand have only recently admitted publicly that a decades-old ban on military training and exercises … had been lifted.”

Washington had downgraded its military relationship with New Zealand in 1984 after Wellington established a long-term ban on visits by U.S., British, and other nuclear-armed or propelled naval vessels. The following year New Zealand was formally suspended from the 1951 Anzus military pact with the United States and Australia.

These moves did not stop New Zealand’s rulers from continuing full collaboration with the Australian government and more limited ties with the U.S. and U.K. governments. New Zealand troops have joined imperialist interventions from Timor-Leste, to the Solomon Islands, to Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2004 the George W. Bush administration opened the door to New Zealand participation in the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative by waiving restrictions on joint military operations. The PSI, aimed above all at Iran and North Korea, allows warships of PSI member countries to stop and board vessels on the pretext of searching for nuclear weapons technology.

A visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in November 2010 brought the rift to “a symbolic full stop,” said the Dominion Post editors at the time. Clinton and Key signed the Wellington Declaration formalizing closer military collaboration, including “a new focus on practical cooperation in the Pacific region.” Key exulted, “Relations have been warming since 2001 and today that was put on paper.”

In April and May of this year, the New Zealand navy’s Canterbury joined in exercises with the USS Cleveland. According to the NZ Herald, this was “the first real [bilateral] exercise with the United States since the Anzus rift in 1984.” The same newspaper reported August 19 that a New Zealand Air Force Hercules surveillance plane was operating in Arkansas skies in the “first joint training exercise with the US Air Force in 25 years.”

In July, a New Zealand naval captain was appointed head of a U.S.-led “anti-piracy” fleet operating in the Gulf of Aden and Somali basin region. This was “the first time that a Royal New Zealand Naval Officer has commanded a major multinational task force in recent decades,” noted an official military news release here.

Foreign Minister Murray McCully has welcomed “the increased presence of the U.S. in the Pacific region,” saying that the U.S. Coast Guard is a “stalwart and pragmatic partner” of New Zealand forces policing territorial zones around Pacific Island states.

Since China is second only to Australia among New Zealand’s trading partners, capitalist politicians here have been more cautious than their U.S. or Australian allies in publicly disapproving of Beijing’s steps to bolster its military defense in the Pacific. But spokespeople for Wellington have expressed concern about China’s economic ties with South Pacific nations, which New Zealand’s imperialist rulers consider to be within their realm.

According to the Australia-based Lowy Institute, Chinese loans made up 32 percent of Tonga’s 2005-2009 gross domestic product and, over the same period, 16 percent of the GDP of the Cook Islands and Samoa.
 
 
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US imperialists concerned over losing clout to China in Pacific  
 
 
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