Bullying of Cook Islands shows hypocrisy of sub-imperial henchmen
New Zealand PM visits Shanghai on a trade mission while his government cuts its protectorate's funding over partnership deals with China.
New Zealand’s withdrawal of development funding for its tiny Pacific protectorate the Cook Islands is remarkable for its crude colonial bullying as well as its increasingly incoherent China policy.
The country’s Department of Foreign Affairs (MFAT) announced today (Thursday, June 19) it was suspending $18.2 million ($US11 million) in budget funding over the Cook Islands' deepening ties with China.
A strategic partnership agreement between China and New Zealand’s former colony in mid-February caused uproar in Wellington, with Foreign Minister Winston Peters furiously objecting that his government had not been consulted. He argued that Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown had broken a constitutional obligation to do so, given that the deal may conflict with New Zealand’s strategic and security interests, which are of course nowadays the geostrategic interests of the US.
Brown rejected the claim and argued he had instead legitimately exercised his nation’s autonomy, in its own national interests, and that having development ties with both New Zealand and China should not be seen as a threat.
The Cook Islands, with a population of approximately 20,000, has been a self-governing territory in “free association” with New Zealand since 1964. A 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration signed between the two nations requires them to consult each other on defence and security.
Brown responded to the funding suspension on Friday, June 20, telling his Parliament that "decisions to unilaterally pause core sector support reflect a patronising approach, inconsistent with modern partnership”.
The Cook Islands wide-ranging agreement with China, set out in three memorandums of understanding, included a deal to develop port and wharf facilities, something Western elites and local NATO-aligned think tankers like Professor Anne Marie Brady, as well as establishment media, have flagged as a threat because of the potential for “dual-use” by China’s military.
It also included a plan to explore the nation’s mineral-rich seafloor, which Defence Minister Judith Collins described at the Munich Security Conference in late February as “having an enormous treasury with a very small lock”.
Over the past three years, New Zealand had provided nearly $200 million to the Cook Islands through its development programme. Today, a spokesperson for Peters in a statement said New Zealand would not consider significant new funding until the Cook Islands took "concrete steps" to repair the relationship and restore trust.
It read: "Funding relies on a high trust bilateral relationship. New Zealand hopes that steps will be taken swiftly to address New Zealand's concerns so that this support can be resumed as soon as possible."
What specific concrete steps New Zealand is demanding from the Cook Islands isn’t yet clear, but it will inevitably involve ceding power to Wellington in its future decision-making and most likely in any talks with China about mineral extraction. The demand also signals to other Pacific nations a willingness of sub-imperial powers like New Zealand and Australia to link development aid and investment with control of its policy regarding China.
Australia already imposes ‘strategic trust’ clauses in deals with Pacific nations, since the Solomon Islands’ strategic partnership deal with China signed in 2023 caused alarm in Western corridors of power. New Zealand is mooted to be planning something similar.
China’s development aid on the other hand does not come with similar requirements.
Making Pacific Islands choose between China and Western nations involved in an escalating geopolitical powerplay may push those nations closer to China as a preferred and reliable economic partner, lest they be held hostage with sudden threats of funding cuts to force compliance to Western interests at the expense of their own.
Ironically, New Zealand itself is at risk of acting against its own interests, having in recent years dangerously aligned with NATO and US preparations for war with China, by far its biggest trading partner.
The Cook Islands funding cut comes as New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon visits China on a trade mission this week. In Shanghai on Thursday, June 19 (local time), Luxon announced partnership deals worth $871 million, including in the agricultural, tourism, and educational sectors. It came after news of a new Southern Link transit route from China to South America, via Auckland.
At the time of publishing, no media had asked Luxon if Chinese officials had brought up the Cook Islands cuts with him.
The issue hadn’t escaped the attention of political opponents back home.
“While Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is in China forging trade agreements with Māori exporters, he is punishing the Cook Islands for doing the same,” Te Pāti Māori Co-leader, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said.
"This is not about diplomacy, it’s about control. This government is using funding as a weapon against one of our closest whanaunga, for exercising its own sovereignty.
“The Cook Islands has a unique free association agreement with New Zealand. While they’re self-governing, New Zealand provides defence and foreign affairs assistance when requested. Yet this aid relationship is now being weaponised as a tool of political obedience.”
Ngarewa-Packer is correct. Punishing the Cook Islands for something that New Zealand strives to do - maintaining multilateral trade ties - is blatant hypocrisy. It is also something much more sinister, forming part of a tactic of containing China on behalf of the US. It shows that when it comes to a choice of backing Pacific Island interests or the interests of the US, its neighbours will lose out.
As Luxon busied himself flogging grass-fed beef, cosmetics and dairy products to Chinese partners this week, Chinese Communist Party officials watched intently, possibly with a degree of bemusement and scepticism.
CEO of investment firm Mahon China, David Mahon, a seasoned commentator on China, observed: “There will be the customary red carpets, handshakes and smiles when Prime Minister Luxon is in Beijing this week, but sources in the Chinese Government have been clear that they have lost trust in their fair weather trading partner. Behind the scenes there may be some terse words and perhaps warnings of possible changes to the New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement if Luxon continues with his aims to ally with Washington against Beijing.”
Just over a month earlier, Luxon had been employing the same used-car salesmanship to a justify a massive hike in military spending to the New Zealand public. A 2025 Defence Capability Plan set forth $12 billion in planned spending over the next four years, including $9 billion in new spending.
In a social media post, Defence Minister Collins struggled to read dense NATO messaging from a teleprompter explaining why it was necessary, while Luxon simplified it by claiming New Zealanders had an obligation to protect a rules-based global order that accounted for the country’s wealth and prosperity and that the defence spend was necessary to make a militarily viable effort if needed.
New Zealand’s military would then act as a ‘force multiplier’ in the region to confront China, alongside Western imperial allies, as he put it to the Financial Times back in July 2024.
Luxon’s justification for his country’s preparations for war with China is an updated version of ‘the price of your citizenship’ argument used over a century ago to cajole and browbeat young men into fighting for the Empire during World War I, men who were then slaughtered in Europe on an industrial scale in 1915. The insidious recruitment pitch is referenced by the country’s famous conscientious objector to the war, Archibald Baxter, in his book We will Not Cease.
But these narrative variants increasingly don’t make any sense.
Luxon’s China visit underlines the flawed reasoning behind the defence spending on behalf of US hegemony. It is China that accounts for much of New Zealand’s wealth, while Trump’s trade tariffs have put a dent in the country’s GDP in recent times. The rise of BRICS as a key economic force in the relatively peaceful Asia-Pacific region is destined to add to that wealth, but only if New Zealand ditches its growing role as a sub-imperial henchman and embraces a genuinely peaceful co-existence with its sovereign neighbours.
The Cook Islands probably will not become New Zealand's Cuba, but the current New Zealand government seems determined to send it in that direction.
It’s crazy that Luxon gaslights us by claiming the increase spending on military capacity is about defending the ‘rules based order’, whilst ethno supremist apartheid Israel and its enablers are committing a holocaust and he is aligning us with such vile filth.