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Jean Iau

Helen Clark spent nine years running New Zealand and eight more running the United Nations’ development arm.
Now, the former prime minister has a warning for the country she once led: do not let the scramble for Pacific security deals crowd out its much-vaunted independent foreign policy tradition.
Speaking to This Week in Asia in Singapore on Tuesday, Clark argued that Wellington’s recent flurry of defence diplomacy – including a defence cooperation pact with Papua New Guinea, a joint security declaration with the Cook Islands and talk of joining a fledgling Australia-Fiji alliance – risked the Pacific’s future as “a zone of peace”.
For decades, New Zealand’s foreign policy has rested on two pillars: independence from superpower blocs and a Pacific kept free of nuclear weapons. Both are now being tested.
Australia’s pursuit of nuclear-powered submarines under the Aukus pact with the United States and Britain is perhaps the clearest example of how.

“The Australians being in the market for nuclear submarines isn’t helpful – not that it’s clear they’ll ever get them, but what they’ll get is an American base for nuclear submarines,” said Clark, 76, who was in Singapore to deliver the keynote address at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies’ International Conference on Cohesive Societies Interlude event.
“I think there are a lot of people who would think, as I do, that we should be focusing on keeping the Pacific as a zone of peace.”
New Zealand’s current government, a coalition of the National Party, ACT and New Zealand First, has reportedly been weighing joining Aukus’ so-called Pillar 2, which focuses on sharing advanced military technologies other than nuclear submarines.
But Clark questioned the very premise underpinning the pact: that the US could indefinitely guarantee Pacific security while also juggling commitments elsewhere.
She invoked Australian strategist Hugh White, who has long argued that China’s rise makes US primacy in East Asia and the Western Pacific increasingly unsustainable, and that Washington may need to share power rather than assume it can remain dominant.
Clark pointed to the recent war on Iran as a case study in US overreach, arguing that Washington did not spend enough on its military to maintain Western Pacific dominance, and noted it had been preoccupied this year with the Iran conflict.
“Apply that to the Asia-Pacific context. It’s not real, is it? So this is all a game of bluff. The key thing is to find what the geopolitical balance in the Pacific is going forward,” she said, adding that traditional US allies and partners wanted to see its continued involvement but had begun to lower their expectations.


Proxy principles
Clark said Wellington needed to guard against perceptions that it was becoming an instrument of great power rivalry.
“New Zealand must never be seen as a proxy,” she said. “There have been some unfortunate moves by the current government, but I don’t see that as a long-term trajectory for New Zealand.”
One of the defining moments of Clark’s tenure as the country’s 37th prime minister, from 1999 to 2008, was her refusal to send combat troops to the Iraq war in 2003, since the US-led invasion lacked a UN mandate. Wellington instead deployed non-combat military engineers and medical personnel to assist with post-war reconstruction.
More recently, she has criticised Washington’s unilateral tariffs, saying they “cannot be consistent with World Trade Organization rules”, while arguing that countries retain the agency to trade without the US through smaller groupings.
Clark acknowledged public concern that the current administration was aligning more closely with Washington and abandoning New Zealand’s independent foreign policy, but said the balance would shift with a change of government.
“Generally, New Zealanders have been quite proud of their independent foreign policy and New Zealand taking stands based on principle and law, and not just putting up their hand because a great power asked it to,” she said.
She has also criticised Wellington’s decision to join a small group of nations that formally rejected the World Health Organization’s new pandemic rules earlier this year, reportedly warning that it risked turning New Zealand into an “irrelevant” and “quirky actor with little to contribute” on the world stage.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters recently provoked a diplomatic complaint from Beijing after telling China-born Green Party MP Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go back to your own country” during a parliamentary debate on July 29.
Clark called Peters’ comments “damaging” to New Zealand-China relations.

Engaging Beijing
On China itself, Clark said its position on the world stage had shifted since her time in office, pointing to President Xi Jinping’s recent keynote address on global artificial intelligence governance.
“Power abhors a vacuum,” she said, adding that China’s continued success provided opportunities for all.
“We need to continually work on how we maintain good engagement and dialogue, notwithstanding that we may have concerns about issues within and around China.”
That same instinct for de-escalation shapes her views of Taiwan, saying that no country should give Beijing a reason to act – a formula that rules out “unilateral declarations of independence” as much as it does acts of coercion.
Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US and its allies, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but do oppose any attempt to take the self-governed island by force.
“What we should all be doing is employing every good office we have diplomatically to ensure that this doesn’t happen,” Clark said. “You have to calm it down. These kinds of ambivalent arrangements can go for a very long time if everyone keeps their heads.”
It is a philosophy that naturally extends to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ consensus-driven decision-making approach, often criticised for its glacial pace but defended by Clark as a feature, not a flaw.
“Asean is very aware that it represents a very wide range of countries with different histories, different orientations, but the key thing is that it stays together and it works for common positions, which may take a long time to get to, but that is part of the process,” she said.


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New Zealand’s former prime minister Helen Clark. Photo: AFP

New Zealand’s former prime minister Helen Clark speaks to This Week in Asia in Singapore on Tuesday. Photo: Jean Iau

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Chris Penk, New Zealand’s minister of defence, signed an agreement with Papua New Guinea to expand joint maritime surveillance, military exercises and personnel exchanges on July 22. Photo: Reuters

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Calling the US Pacific strategy a ‘game of bluff’, Clark urges Wellington to defend its independent foreign policy tradition


Calling the US Pacific strategy a ‘game of bluff’, Clark urges Wellington to defend its independent foreign policy tradition.


.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Calling the US Pacific strategy a ‘game of bluff’, Clark urges Wellington to defend its independent foreign policy tradition

Calling the US Pacific strategy a ‘game of bluff’, Clark urges Wellington to defend its independent foreign policy tradition