Little has it right

The Herald reports:

“What I’m concerned about is that the Labour Government has been drawn into seeing everything through the security lens, not through the peace lens.

“You don’t hear the word very often emanating from the Government about the importance of promotion of peace.”

I’d have no fears about China’s economic rise, if China had stayed on the course it started in the late 1990s of becoming less aggressive, of respecting the freedoms it promised Hong Kong, and gradually allowing more civil liberties.

But over the last few years China has acted very aggressively, with the last straw for many being their implicit support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So I want peace absolutely. But let’s recognise that there is a close to zero chance that peace will end due to the US or its allies attacking China. It will end if China tries to kill off democracy in Taiwan by way of military force.

Defence Minister Andrew Little agrees that New Zealand has already picked a side – decades ago – and it sat behind New Zealand’s support for Ukraine after its invasion by Russia.

“We are a small country,” he told the Herald this week. “We depend on the rest of the world signing up to and adhering to the international rule of law. When we see it breached in such a flagrant way, we’ve got to be in there supporting, [as] in Ukraine’s case, the victim of that breach.

“Those are values we have signed up to. That is the side we have picked and we have been on that side for decades and decades, and we’ll continue to be on that side. And we will always pick that side.”

It was those values that would determine any future choices as well.

This is exactly right. Our values as a democratic liberal country are what count.