I recently watched Guyon Espiner's interview with China's ambassador to New Zealand, Dr. Wang Xiaolong, and in the interview Wang Xiaolong didn't have anything good to say about America's role as the global policeman. In fact he went as far as calling them "the great interferer" and accused the United States of using "colour revolutions". A term which, in New Zealand, is usually considered a Russian propaganda term.
Given the tremendous combined economic power of the BRICS nations I think that New Zealand should consider having equal relationships with countries, instead of taking sides as if we were still in the last century. There is absolutely no reason to sign onto crap like the AUKUS pillar two, which may involve getting involved in drone and missile production.
On Reddit a while ago, people thought AUKUS was a great idea. In the newspaper, they whine that we are only getting pillar two. We won't even be getting nuclear subs, or deploying our navy in the next big war. How sad lol
If AUKUS involves New Zealand working with the U.S. on drone and missile technology, is that something we want? I know the political class are mentally ill, but are we, the citizens, comfortable if our people and our engineers are going to work on technology that's going to kill Chinese soldiers in the South China Sea?
I'd love to see this from Winston Peters' view or Judith Collins' view, but I can't shove my head that far up my arse. Already there will be redditors coping hard on this topic by saying we can just put sanctions on China in a few years, and shift all our trade to India. I think that's extremely naive. Just re-shape the whole economy, so that we can afford to piss off China, and keep supporting U.S. supremacy? What does our country get from constantly pleasing the US?
The BRICS nations are growing their influence and promoting multi-polarity and ideas like non-alignment, but for some reason the media, the parliament, and all the "security experts" in New Zealand say that NZ must be aligned with the United States.
I don't support sanctions because I don't think that trade should revolve around politics. I believe we should have equal trade relations with all countries and not get involved with messy bloc politics. I laugh at Trump's threat to put economic sanctions on countries that stop trading in the US dollar. If say, 6 or 12 countries start using a cryptocurrency to trade, but without ever using the USD in the transaction, will Winston Peters come out and condemn this? lol
There is no reason to further align ourselves with a declining global power that keeps pushing its rivals together. We are in Five Eyes and that should be the limit. New Zealand should trade with whoever offers the best deals, and we should have no involvement in military alliances or any form of politically influenced trade.
The United States can only sit and watch as Russian soldiers advance toward Pokrovsk. Within 30 years China will reunify Taiwan by force, and there's nothing that the United States can do, because they don't have the power any more, the world has moved on.
The NZ parliament needs to die off and be replaced with younger people because these old nutters like Winston Peters don't get it. For example, they talk about blocking butter exports to Russia, because "raising the cost" will apparently influence something. What cost? What influence? The Soviet people lost 10 million people when they fought Germany. I'm sure they could lose 0.5% of that in the current conflict, and pay more for butter, and it still won't influence any political or military decisions.
I wish Winston Peters and the others would understand this but they're just too damn old. Nobody should tell us who we can or can't trade with. Trade does not equal political support. Just because the U.S. has declining relations with China, it doesn't mean we should stop trading with China. The propaganda in the news is already emerging, that China is a threat and we should move to other markets. There's really nothing wrong with having good relations with other countries in the region, but I guess the yanks want us to always side with them and orientate New Zealand's economy around US political interests. Weak as.
Sooner or later we had better figure out what the 21st century is going to look like, and adapt accordingly.
You are looking at the issue from a moral perspective rather than a logical perspective. Russia has a lot of power here - they have hundreds of thousands of troops in Ukraine, they have Oreshnik missiles which could destroy Kyiv's government and economy district. The only thing which could save Ukraine now, is for Russia's economy to collapse. Don't count on that happening - if there was a way to force it to happen, then it would have happened in 2022.
When I said "trick" I meant that Ukraine wants to invite foreign armies to the border, and then deceive the world with something, a provocation, that would "justify" foreign armies to invade Donbass and Crimea. We already see these provocations in the media. Last July, Ukraine claimed that Russia used a KH-101 missile to deliberately strike the children's section of a hospital in Kyiv. This was false and designed to provoke outrage in the West.
If a KH-101 had hit a building, there would be no survivors. Yet only 2 people were killed, leading me to believe that the missile was not a KH-101, but rather an air defence missile launched by Ukraine, which missed its target and ran out of fuel and crashed into the hospital, killing 2 adults and injuring 35. If Russia was deliberately trying to kill as many civilians as possible, why would they waste a missile worth millions of dollars, just for the sake of killing 2 random people?
The Ukrainian government is counting on a deception to provoke a full-scale war between European nations and Russia.
The most interesting part is whether Trump will support Ukraine, or whether Trump will see Ukraine as a liability and give up on the situation. So far we already know that one of Russia's negotiators has ruled out any concessions. When asked if Russia would give back land to Ukraine, he said to the BBC "why should we? we have liberated lands where russian people are living for centuries". We are now back at 2014, wondering whether to give-in to Russia's 2014 demands, or continue the war for another 2 years or longer in the hope that Russia's economy collapses, causing their army to disintegrate.