Former NZ PM Helen Clark warns against New Zealand becoming a proxy in US Pacific strategy

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.