One of William Blake’s most insightful rhyming couplets is: A truth that’s told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent. Jacinda Ardern is an arch-liar, despite promising never to tell a lie in politics (which turned out to be just her first political lie).
As the BFD recently reported, Ardern blatantly lied about Australian PM Scott Morrison not extending flood relief to New Zealanders living in NSW.
But far more damaging is when Ardern tells the truth with bad intent.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister has warned the West not to cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a broader battle between autocracy and democracy, saying it could undermine efforts to get China to help ramp-up pressure on Moscow.
In a sense, Ardern – much as it galls me to admit – is partly right. As I wrote in its first weeks, the invasion is being cynically exploited by Europe and especially by the US as a proxy war to weaken Russia and fatten the coffers of the military-industrial complex. Had it not been for Joe Biden funnelling $60 billion of weaponry paid for by US taxpayers into Ukraine, the war would almost certainly have been settled by a negotiated peace months ago – and thousands of lives spared.
But spare me for thinking that Ardern’s intervention is aimed at anything but pandering to Beijing.
However, she cautioned against framing the battle in stark ideological terms, saying it was important to bring together a broad international coalition of countries – including China – to push back against Russia.
“Let’s not assume that China, as a member of the [UN] Security Council, does not have a role to play [in] placing pressure [on Russia] in response to what is the loss of territorial integrity at the hands of Russia,” she said.
“Let’s not isolate and assume that only democracies take that view.”
It is also true-ish that, as Ardern says, Russia’s invasion is not necessarily a curtain-raiser for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Despite the sabre-rattling rhetoric of some Western think-tanks, a cross-straits invasion of Taiwan would be a sea-borne invasion on a scale never before attempted in human history. Normandy would have been a doddle by comparison.
“In the wake of the tensions we see rising, including in our Indo-Pacific region, diplomacy must become the strongest tool and de-escalation the loudest call,” she said.
“We won’t succeed, however, if those parties we seek to engage with are increasingly isolated and the region we inhabit becomes increasingly divided and polarised.”
ABC Australia
Ardern is echoing Beijing’s self-serving rhetoric that it is somehow a beneficent global citizen, promoting global harmony and cooperation.
The reality, as former Australian Defence Minister Kevin Andrews recently wrote, is that China is embarked on an old-fashioned “colonial project”. Xi Xinping’s signature foreign policy, the Belt and Road Intitiative, is being wielded as debt-trap diplomacy. The Chinese Communist Party recently passed a slew of laws that allow the People’s Liberation Army to be deployed overseas to “secure vital transport routes” and “safeguard China’s overseas investments, projects and personnel”.
Where Russia is bluntly asserting its interests in its region, China is being far more subtle.
And its useful idiots are following its lead. They may be telling the truth – or at least part of it – but they do so with very bad intent indeed.
The intent is to “de-escalate tensions” and give China the breathing space it has enjoyed to date, to extend its web of influence across the Pacific, unmolested and unopposed. Even now, Honiara is green-lighting an escalating Chinese “police” presence on its islands.
But the Solomons are far from the only islands in the South Pacific who are holding their hands out for Beijing’s cash.
