Diplomacy is never easy but the new coalition government has tied itself in knots by committing defence personnel to combat Houthi rebels threatening maritime trade in the Red Sea while trying to ignore the connection to the crisis in Gaza.
New Zealand has two detachments abroad serving in critical conflicts: Ukraine, and now, a 10-nation “pop-up” alliance led by the United States to confront the Houthis in Yemen.
The government, not entirely convincingly, asks us to believe there is no connection between the scorched-earth Israeli retaliation against Hamas in Gaza for the October 7outrages and the deployment against the Houthis. It wants to paper over the ambiguity of joining a US-led alliance against the Houthis when Washington supplies the military and diplomatic cover for the Israel attacks and refuses to back our own calls for a ceasefire.
“Any suggestion our ongoing support for maritime security in the Middle East is connected to recent developments in Israel and the Gaza Strip is wrong,” Foreign Minister Winston Peters insisted. “We are contributing to this military action for the same reason New Zealand has sent defence personnel to the Middle East for decades – we care deeply about regional security because our economic and strategic interests depend on it.”
It appears that in the transition from the Labour government through the interregnum before the coalition arrived in November, that policy shifted – going from one led by a longstanding commitment to the idea of a two-state solution in the Middle East and defence of rulesbased international affairs to one more clearly determined to align
