Unlike Mike Smith and other noisy members of the imperialist support group, I applaud that NZ foreign policy has remained consistent in upholding UN and ICC policies against invasions and forced annexations.
Christopher Luxon has finally managed to do something that wasn’t simply blindly negative for the sake of garnishing support from the unthinking in our society.
He is following in the path of our last two prime ministers in support of New Zealand’s long support of the principles of the United Nations.
In June 2022 Jacinda Ardern called Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“My key message back to the leadership in Ukraine would be that our support will continue regardless of a visit. New Zealand is standing in solidarity with Ukraine, and I hope they have seen that through our ongoing support,” she said.
She said the conflict could be “long and drawn out” but “New Zealand’s support would continue”.
In May 2023 Chris Hipkins has ‘warm and insightful’ phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“New Zealand steadfastly supports Ukraine and will continue to look for ways we can provide meaningful contributions,” Hipkins said.
Hipkins was expected to announce further support for Ukraine while in the UK, but a visit to Ukraine was currently not on his schedule.
In December 2023 Christopher Luxon reiterates NZ’s support ‘strong and constant’ in war against Russia.
“I’ve just spoken with Ukraine President and reiterated New Zealand’s support in response to Russia’s war of aggression,” Luxon posted.
The reason for New Zealand’s support is based in international law and history. The UN was founded on the principles of national sovereignty, peaceful resolution of conflicts, self-determination of peoples, and an abhorrence of the threat of use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
The signing of the UN charter by states including the USSR, USA and the various imperialistic states of Europe and Asia didn’t mean that examples of these war-inducing violation of international relations didn’t happen. But their incidence, and the incidence of the mayhem, deaths and maiming of people that had been so prevalent in the previous 150 years has been massively reduced. That is despite the massive world increases in population since 1945.
We haven’t seen the kinds of inter-state wars on the scale of wars of the 19th and first part of the 20th century like the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, Second Sino-Japanese War, and World War II. Most of the larger casualty conflicts after the establishment of the UN have been civil wars, and even those seem muted compared to wastelands between 1800 and 1947. Have a look down the abhorrent list of estimated casualties recorded in wars over time.
Or have a look at a view from 1816 to 2007 that accounts for population increases and highlights the reduced death risks from wars. Since 2007, and despite some increases in conflicts, the rate has has continued to decrease.
Sure, Russia appears to have a problem with the UN ideas of territorial integrity. It seems to prefer instead to sprout the ideas of imperial rights due to stealth (like sneaking special forces into Crimea out of uniform) and might (a sneak attack against Ukraine). Nor do they have no respect for self-determination of peoples (referendums in occupied territories under martial law with no impartial observers are just fakes). Bullshit unsubstantiated propaganda making mountains out of molehills about far-right Ukrainian neo-nazis who could only get a few percent in national elections being the most obvious.
Frankly I don’t rate any of this bullshit as worth excusing. The crap of moving military over a borders and then annexing large swathes of territory were the causes of the high casualty rates that decimated the early 20th century. These are all tired tactics of imperialists doing the usual bullshit about manifest destinies and causing the enormous military casualties and the downstream deaths of even more in civilian deaths
Yet apparently, there are some people weak minded enough to believe this crap. Somehow they seem to want more wars and more casualties for some kind of daft ideological reasons – that they simply cannot articulate in any coherent form. Mostly it usually seems to end up with some kind of anti-US imperial focus. That sometimes has some validity – most notably in the completely stupid Iraq war from 2003-2011. However it doesn’t include any territorial acquisitions since 1947.
Since 2014, Russia has now done a number of forced annexations of Republic of Crimea, Donetsk People’s Republic, and Luhansk People’s Republic after military occupation since 2013. They also lay claim to territories in Ukraine that they do not even occupy. It also appears to have several more potential annexations using the same kinds of ethnic arguments underway in Russian occupied Transnistria in Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in northern Georgia.
Personally I looked through all of military and political history of conflicts when I was a teenager, and came to the conclusion that article 2 of the UN charter, for all its obvious flaws like the security council vetoes, was better than anything else devised to limit conflicts. The low casualty rates in the history of the last 70+ years supports that.
That isn’t because militarism has been any less rampant. It has been because there has been some pretty clear bounds to the advantages of territorial expansion by conquest. As citizen and ex-soldier I am extremely glad that New Zealand does not support the kind of rank military territorial imperialism that the Russia Federation and Israel are the current state exponents of.
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