Cook Islands Find Themselves in Political Storm

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John telegraph-Journal

The Pacific islands are small but in many ways they are mighty. These nations sit in an ocean that accounts for a third of the world’s surface area. What happens in their waters, politically, economically, and diplomatically, will help shape the future of the world.

One of the smallest jurisdictions, the Cook Islands, an archipelago of 15 islands between New Zealand and Hawaii, has been self-governing in free association with New Zealand since 1965, sharing a military and passports. New Zealand also provides the Cook Islands with budgetary assistance. It is permitted an independent foreign policy, but the two countries are required to consult on security, defence and foreign policy issues.

Its population of 15,040 is dwarfed by more than 90,000 who identify as Cook Island Maori and who live in Aotearoa, the Maori name for New Zealand. And while tourism is a key industry, the islanders want to ensure that sustainability remains at the nation’s core.

Brad Kirner, director of destination development at the Cook Islands Tourism Corporation, admits that discussions about global warming in the community can be fraught. “If we face reality it’s going to need some pretty serious adaptation measures put in play.” He adds that “travel is a significant contributor to global warming, and we need to face that fact.”

The Cook Islands may be tiny, but its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), an area of the sea in which a  state has exclusive rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from water and wind.^[covers 1,960,027 square kilometres. Cook Islanders have taken marine conservation to a global scale.

These dots in a huge ocean have now become part of geopolitical rivalries. China has been wooing Pacific Island countries with strategic partnership agreements, and this has caused friction with New Zealand, Australia and other Pacific nations.

Full diplomatic relations between the Cooks and China were established in 1997. This past February, the country surprised New Zealand by signing a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement with Beijing on regional cooperation and economic issues. They cover infrastructure, ship-building, tourism, agriculture, technology, education and, perhaps crucially, deep-sea mineral exploration.

While New Zealand has also boosted aid, it cannot compete financially with China. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown maintained that if New Zealand could not afford to fund the country’s national infrastructure investment plan – billed at $650 million — the Cook Islands would need to look elsewhere.

He insisted that the agreement with Beijing did not “replace our longstanding relationships with New Zealand, Australia and others, but rather complements them, ensuring that we have a diversified portfolio of partnerships.” He has asserted that “engagement has been consistent, respectful and open” and that the Cook Islands has the right to forge its own path as a self-governing country.

Brown contends his decisions will be based on the “long-term interests” of the Islands, which are resource-rich -- but vulnerable to climate change. China’s foreign ministry maintained it was ready to work with the country to “achieve new progress.” Not everyone agrees. There were protests and a vote of no confidence against Brown in parliament, which he survived in February.

The agreement did not include security cooperation, but it did allow for more China-funded infrastructure projects. And New Zealand, the biggest provider of financial support for the Cook Islands, was not reassured. Since Cook Islanders can also freely work and live in New Zealand, it heightened security concerns after the agreement with China was signed.

While visiting China in June, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced that millions of dollars in funding would be suspended while his government examines the “breadth and content” of the agreements with China. The Islands government was not transparent about the scope of its strategic partnership with China, he contended.

The funding pause amounts to a $18 million development assistance payment for the next financial year, according to government figures. The funds in question are part of a larger raft of $116 million in aid provided by New Zealand to the Cook Islands over the past three years under its free association agreement and earmarked for health, education and tourism sectors.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters added that the Cook Islands agreements with China demonstrated a “a gap in understanding” between the governments “about what our special relationship of free association requires.” He called on its government to take “concrete steps to repair the relationship and restore trust.”

Not coincidentally, New Zealand’s intelligence agency this month warned of growing foreign interference and espionage, with China singled out as the “most assertive and powerful” actor, with both the intent and capability to target New Zealand’s interests in the Pacific.

But China’s ambassador, Wang Xiaolong, who was recently in Rarotonga, insisted that the agreements have nothing to do with military or security agenda. “I think it is very clear that the cooperation is largely concentrated on economic cooperation.”

The Cook Islands want to join the United Nations, which New Zealand won’t allow, while China says it will support its aspirations to expand its membership of international organisations. New Zealand has now gone further, calling on Prime Minister Brown to hold a referendum on independence from New Zealand to test public opinion following his defence of the agreements with China.

 

Is the 49th Parallel Now an Ideological Iron Curtain?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

Nine months since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the animosity towards him by many, maybe most, Canadians, continues to grow. It turned around the fortunes of the three most prominent Canadian politicians: Justin Trudeau, the prime minister forced out by his own party; Pierre Poilivre, who had been considered a shoo-in to replace him prior to 2025; and Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal seen as Trudeau’s likely successor.

This earthquake has shaken Canadian-American relations to the core, even more so than during the Vietnam War, when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon viewed Canada as lacking in courage to defend the “free world” against “|Communism.”

The visceral hatred of Trump is more than just due to his ill-considered jibes about making Canada the fifty-first state, in effect ridiculing Canada as a weakling and freeloader, a country that was evading its share militarily and economically in relation to the United States. It’s more than about tariffs and the economy. And Americans, who typically pay little attention to their northern neighbour, know this. Major American newspapers have covered this story – for example, a very prominent article in the New York Times of Aug. 10, “ ‘Profound and Abiding Rage’: Canada’s Answer to America’s Abandonment,” by Canadian Stephen Marche.

“In response to America’s threats,” he contends, “Canada is in the middle of the greatest explosion of nationalism in the country’s history, far more substantial than the nationalism of the 1960s. Then, Canadian identity emerged and proliferated through books and music and the national broadcaster, the CBC, as well as through official policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism. The entire time, Canada was integrating economically and militarily with the United States.” Now Canadians are boycotting American goods and cancelling travel plans to the U.S., many going so far as to define the administration as fascist.

Canada is indeed, in Trump’s mind, a “DEI woke” country on steroids, its education systems captive to left ideologues, and more like the left of the Democratic Party than many American Democrats themselves. It upholds everything Trump is trying to disassemble at home.

Most “elbows up” Canadians who put Mark Carney into power after a campaign that was almost literally about nothing other than Trump, sensed this. “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over,” Carney declared after winning the federal election. But Canadians may not fully realize that this is a deeper and wider rift than one between Ottawa and Washington. It’s part of an ideological conflict within the western world about the very nature of governance and political legitimacy.

In fact, were Canadians more perspicacious, they would agree with what one British commentator has referred to as a new “Cold War,” but one not, as in the past, against Communist powers Russia and China, but between the U.S. and Europe. While the author, Philip Cunliffe, Professor of International Relations at University College London, in his Aug. 13 article “The New Cold War Will Divide the West, America is turning on Europe,” on the UnHerd website, never mentions Canada, this country is clearly on the side of Europe, and it explains why Carney has taken to calling Canada “European,” and in terms of foreign relations he is aligning with Britain, France, and Germany in their positions on the two major conflicts now raging, Gaza and Ukraine.

The clearest exponent of the MAGA Republican worldview is, as Cunliffe asserts, not President Trump, but Vice-President J.D. Vance, who “unleashed the opening volley in this ideological attack in his extraordinary speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference in February, when he calmly and methodically took apart the dismal record of European states on individual liberty and democratic rights.”

Vance criticized European Union interference in the Romanian presidential elections of the previous year, and he also met with the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alice Weidel -- “a figure of obloquy for the European liberal orthodoxy.” Vance called these attacks “tyranny in disguise.” He adopted the same tone that American leaders adopted when speaking about the squashing of popular opposition in the Communist Eastern bloc. He has also accused Europe of engaging in “civilizational suicide” through its unwillingness to halt mass migration.

Vance has not only criticized the British record on free speech, but in a recent visit there, he met with Robert Jenrick, the rival to the current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. He also spoke to Nigel Farage, seen by mainstream British politicians as beyond the pale, but gaining so much support for his anti-immigrant Reform UK Party that he could conceivably become the next British Prime Minister. Though his party won just four seats in the 2024 election, it gained the third largest share of votes, mostly from dissatisfied Conservative voters.

As for the 2024 winner, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Labour Party’s leader wasn’t even on the agenda. In fact a damning new Human Rights Report from the U.S. State Department concurred with Vance. The new dossier on Britain’s civil liberties warns that the U.K. human rights situation has “worsened during the year,” amid “serious restrictions on freedom of expression.” (It also said they are under threat in Germany.) Would Vance say the same about Canada? I wouldn’t bet against it.