DON BRASH: WE CAN'T SAY WE WEREN'T WARNED

“America First” was long the guiding principle of President Trump’s approach to policy. And his understanding of what putting America’s interests first really means was always limited by his background as a real estate developer with no formal training in economics. He had hardly got his feet under the desk in his first term as President when he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement which had been explicitly designed to benefit all the signatories to that agreement, including the United States.

But during his first term as President, Trump was for the most part surrounded by Cabinet members and advisers who were able to constrain many of his dopier ideas.

In his second term, alas, he has appointed people who will seek to satisfy his every whim, no matter how destructive of America’s own long-term interests.

A good example was the so-called Liberation Day tariffs, applied to US imports from almost every country without even the slightest logic in most cases. New Zealand was first hit with a 10% tariff on all our exports to the US, then it was 15%, despite the fact that we have almost no tariffs on US exports to New Zealand. And then tariffs on our exports of beef and kiwifruit into the US market were waived because the President was concerned about the grocery bills facing US households.

Trump appears to regard any bilateral trade deficit as incontrovertible proof that the trading partner is exploiting the US, despite the fact that there isn’t an economist in the world who would accept that argument.

There are plenty of well-informed critics who believe that some international agencies operate very inefficiently, and that some foreign aid is spent wastefully. But Trump’s decision to withdraw from most international agencies and scrap all US foreign aid without warning damaged US interests as well as that of a great many others.

Last month, Trump released his National Security Strategy. It is a relatively short document, which is easy to read. But it is not in the least surprising that it scared the daylights out of a great many people.

Early on, the document asserts:

We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organisations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine [which insisted that no outside Power would be allowed a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere].

In addition, the document made it clear that the US would

halt and reverse the ongoing damage that foreign actors inflict on the American economy while keeping the Indo-Pacific free and open, preserving freedom of navigation in all crucial sea lanes…; supporting our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe…; [and preventing] an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down in that region at great cost.

In other words, we strongly demand all other Powers stay out of our (extended) backyard but demand the right to interfere in the backyard of others when it suits us.

And if there had been any doubt about what the Strategy meant, just days ago the US invaded Venezuela, abducted the President of that country and his wife, all the while making it clear that the US would “run” the country for the foreseeable future and demand access to the country’s very substantial oil reserves.

Trump rather implausibly argued that the exercise was prompted by Venezuela being a major source of drugs to the United States, even though in reality most of the cocaine which Venezuela produces apparently heads to Europe, and only days before the invasion Trump had pardoned somebody sentenced to a multi-year prison term on drug charges.

Just days later, Trump was threatening Colombia and insisting that one way or another the US had to own Greenland – this despite the fact that the US has long had a military base in Greenland and under a formal agreement dating back to 1951 has the right to “construct, install, maintain and operate” military bases across Greenland, “house personnel” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements, and operations of ships, aircraft and waterborne craft”.

Greg Grandin, a professor of History at Yale University, began a brief essay on US foreign policy shortly after the release of the National Security Strategy with the following words:

One wonders what goes on in the minds of the architects of President Trump’s foreign policy. It seems as if they have all taken time to study the classic history books on the causes of the world wars…. and then said to themselves: That’s exactly where we want to take the world….

After Japan’s imperial army invaded Manchuria in 1931, Tokyo declared its own Monroe Doctrine. Britain invoked a ‘British Monroe Doctrine’ to justify the continued existence of its empire. And Adolf Hitler responded to FDR’s demand that he respect the sovereignty of Germany’s neighbours by pointing the US president to his nation’s own Monroe Doctrine: “We Germans hold exactly the same doctrine for Europe, or at least for the region and the interest of the greater German Reich.” As the world marched into a second global war, many of its belligerents did so citing the Monroe Doctrine. [NY Times, 15 December 2025]

What does all this mean for New Zealand? Unsurprisingly and happily, America’s National Security Strategy makes no mention of New Zealand. I’m reminded of the delight which Tim Shadbolt expressed after visiting the Soviet Union in the seventies: he said he had seen a large map of the world which didn’t show New Zealand at all!

It would be great if the US forgot about us entirely in a situation where we have no obvious enemies, unless of course we choose to ally ourselves with the US. China clearly wants to reclaim the authority over Taiwan which it lost in 1895 after losing the first Sino-Japanese War, and there can be little doubt that it resents the proximity of American forces in South Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines and Australia – in exactly the same way that the US has made it clear that it would not tolerate the armed forces of another Power anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

But there is no obvious reason why China would wish to militarily dominate either Australia or New Zealand and, as Professor Jeffery Sachs has noted, China has not crossed an ocean to attack another country in the last 1,000 years.

We just need to avoid painting a target on our chest.

Don Brash

13 January 2026

Declaration of interest: I have visited China in various capacities since I first visited in 1986 as the CEO of the New Zealand Kiwifruit Authority seeking to acquire new kiwifruit plant material. I visited several times as Governor of the Reserve Bank in the ‘nineties, and have visited on several subsequent occasions – when I was Leader of the National Party in Parliament, to lecture at a university in Beijing, and as chairman of the New Zealand subsidiary of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (the largest bank in the world in terms of total assets), a role I still hold. I have visited once as a tourist. I have lived for five years in Washington DC, have visited the US subsequently as a guest of the State Department, and many times in my capacity as Reserve Bank Governor and as a commercial banker. I have also spent many holidays in the US.