In Defence Of New Zealand

Foreign Policy Choices In The Nuclear Age

Ramesh Thakur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429709661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Nuclear-free zones, neutrality, and nonalignment are catchwords that recently have earned unprecedented international publicity for New Zealand's foreign policy. That country's defence policy has also been subjected to its most searching scrutiny since World War II. In this book, Dr. Ramesh Thakur addresses in depth the issues underlying worldwide

1
Introduction

National behaviour, like all human and social behaviour, is purposive: it seeks to attain certain goals. Governments pursue goals in both national politics and international relations. National hopes and aspirations on the world stage are constrained by two sets of considerations. Internally, they must be related to national capability, or the political, economic and military resources available to a country to fulfil its desires. Externally, one nation's goals and capability must be matched with the goals of other nations and the resources available to them. Foreign policy is essentially the attempt to pursue national objectives in the international arena along these lines. The attempt is made jointly by politicians and bureaucrats. Governments formulate foreign policy goals, and democratic governments represent national aspirations. The foreign service bureaucracy advises government on the best "fit" between political goals, national resources and international limitations, and tries to implement specific policy decisions made by government.

Most of the work done by foreign service officials involves routine actions. The broad goals of a nation change but slowly over time. Nevertheless, all foreign policy behaviour takes place within the framework of national objectives which are usually well understood in their broad outlines. Objectives can be general (e.g. peace) or specific (e.g. contributing to a peacekeeping force); many different objectives are pursued simultaneously; and they are not always mutually consistent. One standard textbook divides objectives into three types: core values, middle range objectives, and long term goals.¹ Core interests include preserving a country's territorial integrity and political independence, and may include preserving religious, social, ethnic etc., identity. These are interests in defence of which people may go to war. Middle range objectives include such goals as economic growth, trade, foreign aid, etc. Long term goals refer to hopes as much as interests, e.g. triumph of democracy or communism around the world, establishment of a world government, or achievement of world peace.

For the first half of the twentieth century, New Zealand's foreign policy objectives were more or less subsumed within British Commonwealth interests. The identification with European culture and economy was complemented but not replaced with heightened awareness of increasing American salience after the Second World War. More recently, New Zealand objectives have also begun to take note of its geographical location in the South Pacific and on the edge of Southeast Asia. Events since the Second World War have forced a similar reassessment upon New Zealand foreign policy makers in the economic sphere. Much as military realities during the war compelled New Zealand to seek security after the war in association with the United States rather than Britain, so Britain's entry into the EEC shocked New Zealand into looking for alternative trading partners in Australia, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and even the communist bloc.

The centrality of trade to New Zealand's foreign policy gives it the status of a core value. Consequently, success in trade diversification in turn served to embolden questions regarding the premises of New Zealand defence and foreign policy which had remained unchanged although the world political situation had altered fundamentally by the 1970s. The achievement of strategic parity by the Soviet Union, the growth of nuclear weapons beyond all comprehension, the development of relations with China, the bankruptcy of U.S. policy in Vietnam, the proclamation of the Nixon doctrine limiting U.S. help to allies, and the advent of the Reagan administration laden with aggressive rhetoric: all such developments seemed to indicate to many New Zealanders that the time had come for the country to undertake a comprehensive review of the strategic bases of its external policies.

Alliances

The cornerstone of New Zealand's foreign policy at present is the ANZUS alliance. The call for review is therefore a demand to examine the adequacy of ANZUS. The debate over ANZUS is a specific instance in a large body of scholarly literature on alliances in general. In seeking to protect core values, a country with insufficient resources on its own may well seek to enter into military-diplomatic coalitions with others. Questions that scholars have investigated include: who will ally with whom, under what conditions, and how? do alliances increase national security or international insecurity? why do alliances succeed or fail? Many of these questions remain unsettled and in dispute, for example the relationship between alliances and stability or war avoidance.

Simply put, nations confronted by common problems or pursuing similar objectives will consider banding together as friends, whether this be in military (e.g. NATO), economic (e.g. EEC) or political (e.g. the Commonwealth) spheres. Although countries can join alliances for aggressive purposes, the more usual motive is common defence against a shared military threat. While a common military threat is a necessary condition for forging alliances, it is not a sufficient one. A country can choose neutrality as a safer means of evading the threat in preference to alliances as the means of confronting it, as Belgium did in 1936. Surprisingly, even geographical proximity is not very relevant as a favourable influence for the creation and durability of alliances.

In discussing ANZUS as an alliance, we will pay particular attention to four factors: the conditions which activate the alliance, called the casus foederis; the nature of its commitments; the extent of military cohesion and integration; and the geographic scope of the treaty. While each of these will be considered in detail in the chapter on ANZUS, there is one important point that deserves preliminary mention. In the final analysis, treaties are paper guarantees and paper obligations. A coincidence or clash of interests is far more important than formal treaty provisions. The United Nations Organization in practice means a lot less than its Charter would have us believe; NATO by contrast means a lot more than its formal status. We should therefore be wary of becoming bogged down in excessive legalism when discussing and evaluating alliances, and look to the operational reality beyond.

As for circumstances in which alliances begin to crumble, the most obvious is when objectives that were once shared in common are no longer so. This can happen, for example, when the choice of enemies differs. Thus the military alliance between the USA and Pakistan broke down in the 1960s because Pakistan began to look upon China as an ally rather than its enemy. Or a threat against one alliance partner may not be seen as a threat by the others. Allies can fall out even with dramatic changes in one country creating a fundamental social-political incompatibility between them. This happened when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. In recent years, however, the most potent division within the Western alliance has been caused by the peculiarities of nuclear weapons. This was as true of French doubts on the American nuclear deterrent in the 1960s as it is of European peace movement agonies in the 1980s.

Public Opinion

The reasons for the power of nuclear weapons to drive a wedge between allies will become clearer in the next chapter. For now I want to note the remarkable contribution that fears of nuclear war have made towards galvanizing large sections of Western societies against their own governments. On most foreign policy issues, the lay public is generally regarded as uninformed, inattentive and apathetic. The citizenry tends to be confused rather than coherent, fractured rather than cohesive, and divided rather than consistent on external issues. Consequently, on most foreign policy issues even democratic governments can afford to lead rather than follow public opinion.

Democratic governments must nevertheless stay within certain bounds. Public opinion can have an important role to play at election time in defining the boundaries of permissible foreign policy behaviour, and in constraining the latitude of governments even between elections. The antinuclear campaign of the 1980s is a very good illustration of this. Indeed public concern with the nuclear question is unprecedented in its range, depth and endurance. Efforts by Ronald Reagan to dramatize the steady Soviet buildup of nuclear weapons, and stirrings of anxiety aroused by his own magnified nuclear programme, produced the common result of directing public gaze upon the nuclear issue. Public interest groups like scientists, doctors and computer engineers seized the opportunity to emphasize the globally destructive effects of nuclear war, the total inadequacy of health care after a nuclear attack, and the unreliability of computers in protecting us against accidental nuclear wars.

The cumulative impact of the prolonged nuclear debate has been to convince many hitherto apathetic people that they too should get involved. But how does a New Zealander contribute to the process of reducing the risks of nuclear war? New Zealand is not engaged in a furious arms race, so its people cannot follow the Americans in demanding a nuclear freeze. New Zealand does not host American military bases where nuclear weapons can be deployed in increasing numbers, so it cannot follow the lead of Germany in opposing deployment of more sophisticated nuclear weaponry on its territory. New Zealand does not possess its own nuclear weapons, so its citizens cannot follow the British lead in organizing a campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament by New Zealand.

Faced with these difficulties, anti-nuclear concerns in New Zealand have found expression in demands to throw out ANZUS, become armed neutrals, stop American warships from entering its ports, etc. Opponents of such demands however dismiss them as dangerous sentimental rubbish of the naive, the misled, or the treacherous.

The public is united in the demand that the New Zealand government should pursue policies that reduce the risks of a nuclear world war but do not endanger national security. But which policies best achieve such results? New Zealanders already have a surfeit of arguments on both sides. What I have attempted to do in this book is to analyze relevant information on nuclear issues and present the full range of foreign policy options open to New Zealand. What is the ANZUS debate about? Why was it forged, and is it still relevant? What other policy choices does New Zealand have? How best can it contribute to the cause of nuclear peace?

In responding to these questions, I am more concerned to pose the choices and outline their consequences than to advocate any single position myself. It is my belief that conflict is endemic to polical relations, and that it is the duty of political leadership to find peaceful solutions to a clash of interests. I am not very impressed with the degradation of diplomacy by macho exhortations to virility and tough action in times of crisis. But nor am I impressed with the simplistic calls to morality that would seek to achieve peace by simply willing it while ignoring hard political realities. In short, I prefer a world of prudent pragmatism to one of absolutes.

The advent of nuclear weapons has confronted mankind with profound moral, political and strategic dilemmas. We must learn to understand the dilemmas before we can hope to resolve them. It follows therefore that we cannot simply ignore the nuclear reality. Having eaten of the forbidden fruit of nuclear knowledge, we have been cast into the world of pain and agony. Nuclear weapons can neither be wished away through refusing to look at them, nor can they be discussed and used as just another military weapon. As the Harvard Study Group so thoughtfully put it:

The approach to the nuclear dilemma presented in this book is not a comfortable approach, but that is because the nuclear world is not a comfortable world. It is not comfortable because nuclear weapons are enormously destructive, because the Soviet Union and the United States have many conflicting interests, and finally, because man himself is a fallible creature.²

In writing this book, therefore, I have set myself the following tasks. First, to present a balanced and objective account of the current position and the choices available, with the potentials and limits in each case also sketched out. I have tried to be dispassionate rather than polemical. Second, I have tried to present the arguments clearly. I have tried to avoid technical jargon, and I have tried to make the book "readable." Third, I have nevertheless tried to retain scholarly standards and academic respectability. Fourth, I have attempted to be concise, avoiding the temptations of verbiage. Finally, I have tried to place the New Zealand choices firmly in an international context. It would be tragic if the knowledge and experience gained overseas at much cost and suffering were not utilized for lack of information.

Notes

1. K.J. Holsti, International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983), Ch. 5.

2. The Harvard Nuclear Study Group, Living with Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 253.

2
The Nuclear Debate

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true - James Branch Cabell.

It is a sobering reflection that an entire generation of people has grown up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Though some perhaps might dream of the wide blue skies beyond the cloud, for most people the nuclear reality has been an inescapable element of the strategic landscape. For over three decades, the majority of Americans and Europeans (we simply lack reliable information about the Chinese and Russians) have accepted nuclear deterrence as a proper and dependable cornerstone of Western security policies. Astonishingly, such a fundamental change in relations between different nations was put into place without serious public debate. Only in the 1980s has there been the sort of intensive and widespread call for justifying the strategy of nuclear deterrence that one would have expected at the start of the nuclear era. Today, not just a bunch of trendy intellectuals but a broad cross-section of concerned citizens have been scrutinizing nuclear policies closely and demanding answers from their governments as to the ethics, military necessity and political wisdom of constructing defence policies around "the bomb."

In this chapter I propose to develop the following arguments:

1. Nuclear weapons pose some genuine moral dilemmas, but political leaders cannot base their decisions solely upon ethical considerations;
2. The global nuclear balance is characterized by strategic parity or essential equivalence, rather than meaningful superiority by either side;
3. The need for controlling the arms race is urgent, but technical and political obstacles cannot be overcome easily;
4. A nuclear war cannot be fought and won.

Nuclear Morality

The most troubling dimension to the human conscience is obviously the difficulty of moral justification. There are several strands in the more fabric.¹ First, nuclear deterrence openly contemplates - indeed must be directly based on - the deliberate killing of people in the millions. In their famous pastoral letter of 3 May 1983, the Catholic Bishops of America expressed firm opposition to strategies of deliberate attack on large populations, and strategies that would result in catastrophic loss of life as an "unintended consequence" of weapons aimed at military targets. In the "butchery of untold magnitude" caused by a nuclear war, it would not be very comforting to know that one had died an innocent victim of "collateral damage." (There is also something rather frightening about the way in which strategists talk of a nuclear war as a "nuclear exchange," as though...