For decades it seemed legitimate to believe that environmental catastrophe could be headed off, that world poverty and inadequate education would be tackled, that the nuclear nightmare was a thing of the past.
Alas, no more. We live the nightmare reality daily on our screens. And it’s utterly desolating.
The world order is in free fall. Rogue states such as Myanmar and North Korea jostle with failed states such as the Sudan and Haiti. Putin’s Russia marches into the Ukraine and the Patriarch of Moscow pronounces this rogue act a Holy War. Meanwhile the conduct of the Russian troops in Bucha arouses the gravest accusations of war crimes. Hamas massacres Israeli civilians and the disproportionate response of Israel leads the International Court of Justice to warn that genocide is on the cards in Gaza. China flexes its muscles. One could go on.
The key executive organ of the United Nations, the Security Council, has repeatedly failed to intervene, so the so-called democratic nations have reacted to this tide of anarchy in an exponential surge of militarisation. Nato has never been so strong.
The United States heads the Premier League in armaments expenditure. Even pacifist Japan has joined the game, while our neighbour, Australia, cuddles up to Aukus. Our own government looks bent on quietly abandoning New Zealand’s tradition of independent, pro-Pacific foreign policy.
There is an aura of para-religious entitlement with which all these players vaunt their military hardware. Crude populisms burgeon just under the surface: "We will be great again. Our sacred territory will be secure and we reserve the right to defend ourselves in whatever way we deem appropriate."
One remembers late medieval cities imagining themselves safe behind their vast city walls. Today’s militaristic regimes will no doubt collapse in similar style. Already they exact a terrible cost for indigenous people everywhere, on the environment, on all living things.
We have to do better than this. We need alternative policies to the alarmingly similar realpolitik of the authoritarian East and the neo-liberal West. God knows there are no simple answers.
However, rationality deserves a hearing. In article after article, Prof Robert Patman has critiqued the use of the veto in the United Nations Security Council and argued the case for an independent New Zealand foreign policy. The voices of our young people who demand radical environmental action deserve to be heard.
Every week for more than two years, local Ukrainians and their supporters have gathered in the Octagon at noon on Saturday in silent protest and, since October 2023, Palestinian women and men, with strong support from Ngai Tahu and others, have walked from the museum grounds to the Octagon. Their public pain warrants our respect.
The worst of times can elicit the best of outcomes. The awesome brutality of the apartheid regime produced Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and only a fool would imagine that this process was easy. East German communism operated with a vast network of informers and a suffocating blanket of censorship. Yet in 1989 a non-violent movement of citizens swept the regime aside. Miraculous, given Tiananmen Square was in everyone’s mind.
Yet for a decade little groups of intellectuals and church groups had worked away on alternative models of security. Sponsored by the Quakers and partly on my own steam as a 16th century historian I saw at first hand their crude cyclostyled theological reflections on peace-making which looked so pathetic in the face of the all-seeing State.
Being non-political, biblical material it did not provoke overt repression. It sounded, however, precisely the new note that was to shatter the sterile edifice of bureaucratic communism.
The sterile edifice of the West’s neo-liberalism needs a similar injection of sobriety. This is no doubt predictable speak for a theologian like myself.
But where else, I ask, will be found the acid to dissolve the grand pretensions of the imperialists of every hue? Security is a delicate flower, resting on the trust of all the players in the international scene, not least those in the developing world.
United States President Joe Biden’s imperturbable conviction of the manifest destiny of the US is as much a hindrance to international security as the Holy War delusions of Russia’s Patriarch Kirill. Empires are empires, whether Chinese or Russian or American.
To preserve our most precious asset, the international order, it is imperative we continue to pursue our own independent, pro-Pacific way.
— The Rev Dr Peter Matheson is Emeritus Professor, Knox Theological College, Dunedin.
