Category: Democracy

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Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt One.

This project analyzes security politics in three peripheral democracies (Chile, New Zealand, Portugal) during the 30 years after the end of the Cold War. It argues that changes in the geopolitical landscape and geo-strategic context are interpreted differently by small democracies with peripheral involvement in the major international security decisions of modern times, different geopolitical perspectives, foreign relations networks and dissimilar histories of civil-military relations (post-authoritarian versus post-colonial in this sample). These democracies react to but do not initiate changes in the strategic environment in which they operate. The specific combination of internal and external factors involved in security policy-making  translates into different strategic perspectives, institutional features and policy outcomes that combine the traditional interest in preservation of the nation-state with an understanding of the diplomatic as well as military and intelligence necessities of variegated partnerships in a fluid international environment in which the threat of traditional inter-state conflict shares space with asymmetric warfare involving state and non-state actors. 

The issue of how small states, and small democracies in particular, react to changes in the international security environment is especially salient during periods of global change such as the period following the end of the Cold War. During that time international security affairs suffered two appreciable modifications that required major adjustments on the part of a wide variety of actors, especially militarily and economically vulnerable countries such as those studied here. 

These milestones were the end of the Cold War and its attendant bi-polar security alliance structure at the beginning of the 1990s, the subsequent emergence of a unipolar international system in which the United States served as the world “hegemon” and systems regulator by acting as a global police force that intervened in a number of low intensity conflicts that were not existential in nature (to the US and its major allies), but which promoted regional instability that undermined the international system as a whole. 

This was manifest in the spread of Islamicist-inspired insurgencies in response to Western secular expansion after the decline of the Stalinist bloc. The latter saw its definitive pronouncement on September 11, 2001, which forced another turn of the international security “screw.” That was marked by the advent of global unconventional warfare in concert with ongoing conventional operations and increased preoccupation about the use of weapons of mass destruction by non-state as well as state actors. Notions of cooperative security, which had replaced collective security doctrines as the dominant Western security paradigm in the 1990s, gave way to global asymmetric warfare involving collective security partners. Multinational counter-insurgency operations in parallel with peace-keeping and nation-building (as operations other than war) became the dominant form of conflict until the mid 2010s, 

At the same time, while the US and various coalition partners expended blood and treasure fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Africa, Syria, the Sahel and East Africa (and beyond), other powers directed resources into economic and military development unimpeded by the costs of those “small wars.” India, Russia and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) poured resources into building the foundations for their rise to Great Power status (India and the PRC as emergent powers and Russia as a re-emergent former Superpower). From 2001 to the present the international system began a process of transition, as of yet incomplete, to a multipolar order in which the US is now just one of several Great Powers competing for influence using “hard” as well as “soft” (and “smart” and “sharp”) power in order to achieve strategic objectives. 

The move to multipolarity was accelerated in the 2010s by the end of many of the low intensity conflicts that preoccupied Western military leaders in the early 2000s. The US and its coalition partners withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq and downsized their presence in other areas in which jihadism was present. The territorial defeat of the Islamic State (aka ISIS or Daesh) in Northern Iraq and Syria reduced armed disputes involving jihadists to localized encounters. Syria remains stalemated between the Russian-backed Assad regime, US-backed anti-Assad forces and ISIS remnants while post-Gaddafi Libya is rendered by sectarian violence unimpeded but armed by outside forces. The Taliban have regained control of Afghanistan. Shiite and Sunni militias vie with the post-occupation Iraqi defense forces for dominance. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with the war ongoing, while Israel responded to the October 2023 Hamas attacks that killed 1300 people and in which 150 were taken hostage by engaging in asymmetrical collective punishment against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank that has resulted in over 40,000 deaths, mostly civilian non-combatants. The PRC has expanded its reach deep into the South China Sea, provoking clashes with its littoral neighbors, while at the same time pushing its land claims against countries on its western borders. The Sahel region has seen a rise of indigenous militant groups opposing local authorities and their Western partners (such as the Tuareg in Mali). Via proxies and directly, Iran has conducted attacks on Israeli and Western interests, and the Kim regime in North Korea continues to rattle its nuclear sword. In effect, by the end of the 2010s, the global “War on Terror” was effectively over but conflicts and wars, both conventional and unconventional, remained as a systemic constant.

In both East and West but more importantly, in the global North and South, the strategic gaze has returned to a “Big War” focus involving peer militaries in the emerging multipolar system. The PRC’s aggressive military diplomacy in the South China Sea, marked by island-building projects in disputed waters that defy international norms regarding territorial sovereignty and maritime laws, coupled with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, represent the two most obvious signposts that a return to “Big Wars” is now on the minds of strategic planners world-wide. The way in which peripheral democracies responded to these events and others therefore offers insight into the broader issues at play in the realm of comparative security politics in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. 

So why choose Chile, New Zealand and Portugal as case studies? The justification for their selection is made by the internal differences that underlie their geo-strategic commonality. All are small in population size and geographically distant from the major centers of international conflict and security decision-making. All are countries of the “West,” albeit of different ethnic and cultural traditions and democratic capitalist maturity. All have recent histories of UN-mandated peace keeping, and all have minor involvement in the larger conflicts of the early twenty-first century. Military forces from all of these countries are currently deployed overseas as part of UN-mandated multinational security commitments. All have seen their military politics transformed, to one degree or another, by the strategic-doctrinal and geopolitical shifts that followed the end of the Cold War. Yet, varying in length of democratic experience, institutional stability and levels of economic development, each has a very distinct set of civil-military relations, military institutional culture and strategic perspective that impact on their specific response to the changing global security context after 1990. It is the effects of these changes on national security politics across three geographic regions that are of concern here.

Why go “small, democratic and peripheral” when studying comparative security politics? The world strategic environment is dominated by large countries with substantial military resources and the nature of contemporary conflicts has taken on increasingly complex characteristics, so it appears counter-intuitive, if not inconsequential, to study countries that have no major impact on the strategic matters of the day. However, there is good justification to do so, because small democratic nations serve as weather vanes of larger global trends and the repercussive effects that they generate. It is equally clear is that there are few studies that systematically compare, on a cross-regional basis, the military politics of small, peripheral democracies. There are virtually none that do so with a specific focus on the way the post-Cold War move to unipolarity, subsequent rise of the War on Terror, followed by the shift to multipolarity and return of Big War strategising between peer competitors has influenced the evolution of military-security dynamics in them.

NEXT: A question of size.

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Excerpting “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies.”

In the late 2000s-early 2010s I was researching and writing a book titled “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.” The book was a cross-regional Small-N qualitative comparison of the security strategies and postures of three small democracies on the global geopolitical periphery, both physically and in terms of their involvement in the major strategic decisions of modern times. I set the time frame for the study as the period 1990-2020 because it covered the end of the Cold War as a starting point and included 9/11, the so-called War on Terror and the transition from bipolarity to unipolarity to multipolarity in the International system (the latter which remains ongoing). Its original endpoint will require some extension to account for developments since 2020, but the conceptual apparatus and analytic framework underpinning the study remains valid as a methodological approach (more on this later).

As some readers may know, I departed NZ academia in 2007 and after spending three years at the National University of Singapore I returned to NZ to follow my wife (who took an academic job in her homeland) and to help raise a family. I resurrected and rebranded a consultancy that I had started in the US prior to my arrival in NZ and left academia for good. That was a bittersweet decision to make, since I enjoyed teaching and research, but I am told and have seen that the academic Taylorism and market-driven managerialism that I butted heads with in the 2000s has gotten much worse since my departure from the academe.

Unfortunately, without the institutional support of a university and needing to monetarize my knowledge and experience via the consultancy in order to help pay the bills, I had to abandon the book project. I already had 13,000 words written by way of an introduction outlining the rationale behind and methodological approach to the project, but needed follow up research funds to undertake field research in the countries being studied. That was impossible given my new “business” orientation, plus I had already been turned down for a Marsden Research Grant while still at the NZ university where I used to work (it turns out the Marsden Fund award committee at that time was uninterested in security topics, much less a cross-national comparative study in which NZ was just one case study rather than the focus of attention). In fact, even such basic things as not being able to access a university library greatly impended my ability to do the secondary research required for the book to be comprehensive and thorough in its analysis. If one thinks of the cost of buying specialised books and subscriptions to professional journals and other pertinent material (for example, a single individual subscription to one political science journal can cost US$400/year), then it should be clear that writing academic books involving in-depth research in a social science discipline requires institutional support that I no longer had. Confronted by that reality, I shelved the project even as I thought of resurrecting it later or at least eventually writing an academic article that summarised my findings.

Ten years or so later, I have started to look at what I wrote and decided that I am going to except the introduction here at KP in order to share the conceptual premises and analytic framework used in it. I am hoping that some readers will find the argument of interest and if so inclined, offer critiques, comments and suggestions. I am not sure that the book will ever come to fruition but perhaps I can get that academic article out or simply publish it on the consultancy website even if it is more of a think piece than a targeted assessment of a matter relevant to paying client interests. Most importantly, it gives me a reason to re-visit the original argument and make updates as part of the review and revision process.

The excerpts will begin to appear in the next post. I shall try to keep them relatively short but true to the original book narrative.

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Choosing the lesser evil.

(With Kate Nicholls)

Presidential elections were held in Venezuela on July 28th, delivering an apparent victory for the Opposition headed by Edmundo Gonzalez of the Unitary Democratic Platform (PUD) but a declared victory for incumbent Nicolás Maduro of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Gonzales was the hand-picked successor to businesswoman Maria Corina Machado, who was banned from running for president in the build-up to the election and who remains the power behind the PUD throne. Nicolas Maduro is the heir of Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian” legacy, something that sparked a resurgence amongst Latin American leftist movements at the turn of the 21st century but which has lost its promise and backtracked into decline and decay in the decades since then.

The election was held in the context of widespread claims and considerable evidence of electoral intimidation and fraud, against a backdrop of various restrictions on civil and political liberties, so the legitimacy of the declared outcome has been questioned from within Venezuela as well as abroad. In fact, wide-spread violent protests have broken out since the results were announced, and the possibility of civil war cannot be discounted as more evidence emerges that the election may have in fact been stolen by Maduro and his supporters. It remains to be seen whether he will remain power or face a coup, a domestic civil uprising, an escalation in regional or foreign intervention, or some combination thereof.

As even a causal observer will note, Venezuelan society has become especially polarized since the rise of former coup-monger Hugo Chávez to power in the 1990s (Chavez led two attempted coups before finally gaining power via electoral means). This polarization is not limited to Venezuelan partisan politics. Its echoes are heard as far away as New Zealand and elsewhere. Progressive left voices in particular, on social media and the blogosphere, are supportive of Maduro’s win, reject claims of electoral intimidation and fraud as right-wing disinformation, and highlight the potential for United States involvement should any coup eventuate. This championing of the Chávez-Maduro Bolivarian regime by the left is not new: Chávez’s brand of nationalist-Indigenous populism (cast as indigenous socialism) and its resistance to United States influence in Latin America gained much international attention in the early 2000s and continues to be supported today. For much of the Left in NZ and elsewhere, then and now, the historical sins of the US far outweigh the current crimes of contemporary Left authoritarians, Maduro included. For their part, Western media outlets see Maduro as a tin-pot dictator hell-bent on holding power at all costs, continuing in a long line of bad Leftist henchmen that extends back to Castro, Lenin, Mao and Stalin.

This framing poses a dilemma for political scientists. The discipline tends to prioritise regime type over left-right politics. That is to say, the discipline’s ideological preference is for democracy over dictatorship rather than the policy content of either type of regime. This is an obvious normative bias, one that is readily defended due to the fact that, despite all its limitations and contemporary flaws, empirically democracy does a better job at protecting basic human rights than any other regime type. The balance on how this is achieved (say, between individual and collective rights and responsibilities and between economic freedom, opportunity and equality) then becomes the stuff of quantitative and qualitative positive (objective) micro-analytic analyses rather than normative macro-analytic preferences. That allows political scientists to distinguish between specific types of dictatorship and democracy based on organisational features, public policies and socio-economic outcomes, including variants such as military-bureaucratic versus populist authoritarianism or social versus liberal democracy (which is also why political scientists can get very pedantic when words like “fascist” and “communist” are thrown around as epithets by mindless pundits).

The current situation in Venezuela underscores this dilemma all too well: from a democratic standpoint there is no comfortable way to back a winner given the nature of both sides, and the true loser in the game is likely democracy as an regime type and an ideal. Let’s examine why.

First, the Bolivarian regime. What began as a model for the “Pink Tide” of electoral socialism in Latin America in the late 1990s has devolved into a left-leaning nationalist populist authoritarian kleptocracy characterised by nepotism, corruption and incompetence. An increasingly shaky cadre of state managers, military leaders and Nicolas Maduro loyalists have stripped the country’s coffers nearly bare while allowing critical infrastructure to decay, including in the all-important oil sector. As a result, health, education and welfare indicators (including basics such as provision of transportation and potable water)  have dropped precipitously while poverty, unemployment and crime rates have spiked (a general assessment is provided here). Inflation is running at 130,000 percent per year, rendering the Venezuelan Bolivar worthless as a token of financial exchange. 8 million Venezuelans have migrated abroad, and the Venezuelan State has been hollowed out by bureaucratic parasitism and partisan agency take-overs and patronage. The result is country that has seen its GDP drop a staggering 80 percent in the decade since Maduro succeeded Chavez, even with considerable financial and material support from sympathetic foreign partners such as Cuba, Iran, the PRC and Russia. Truth be told, the country is ruled by thieves posing as anti-imperialist revolutionaries. In this they resemble Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua or Putin’s Russia more than post-Castro Cuba or Xi Jin-ping’s PRC. In short, the situation is dire. Under Maduro Venezuela has become a failed State.

The curse of Venezuela is that the PUD-led opposition is not a choirboy’s convention either. Besides the failed 2002 coup against Chavez and the 2018 drone attack against Maduro during a parade and its member’s history of dubious commitment to democratic practice (Gonzalez’s admirable personal traits as an academic and diplomat as well as his middle class roots notwithstanding), the current opposition has significant ties to Venezuelan ex-pats linked to rightwing Cuban and Nicaraguan exiles, who in turn have attracted the support of conservative groups in the US and other Latin American countries (some of which have connections to the military and oligarchical dictatorships of the 1980s and 1990s as well as contemporary political figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Millei in Argentina). Machado has been courted by and has extensive links to very conservative foreign actors, especially those in the US, for two decades. She also has direct social links to the pre-Boliviarian oligarchical past, as her parents were wealthy members of the old elite. For all of their talk of “democracy” and “freedom” and the gloss of respectability offered by Gonzalez, the unifying feature of the Venezuelan opposition led from behind by Machado is more about retribution and roll-back wrapped in a nostalgic vision of the pre-Boliviarian past and a desire to return the country to the old, albeit re-branded status quo. For all the public discontent about Maduro’s government, that is a non-starter.

For the PUD-led opposition the trouble is that, much like Cuba after the revolution, Venezuela is different for having undergone the Bolivarian experiment, especially when it comes to socio-economic and racial hierarchies. It therefore will not easily return to a past that was not always good for everyone. It is no longer the country of plastic surgery beauty queens, cheap petrol and affordable Scotch whisky for those who lived in the affluent Eastern Caracas foothill suburbs because if nothing else, economic and social decline and outward migration have made for a great leveller in Venezuelan society. In other words, the opposition yearns for a return to a political, social and economic status quo that no longer exists and which will be impossible to return to even if Maduro is forced from power. More importantly, a return to the pre-Bolivarian past is not only unrealistic, it is undesirable.

That is because Venezuela was no shining example of liberal democracy before the rise of Chávez. It is true, underpinned partly by the benefits of oil wealth, that it was one of the most stable polities in Latin America for much of the late twentieth century. The country did not experience the same pattern of populist authoritarianism and military rule that occurred in countries such as Chile, Brazil, or Argentina, or the kind of guerilla and para-military led violence that occurred in neighbouring Colombia or in Central America. Instead, the election-based two party-dominant regime that ruled Venezuela from 1958 until the late 1990s was what comparative politics specialists refer to as a limited, oligarchical or restricted democracy. The spoils of oil wealth and benefits of close ties with the United States were shared between two elite-backed political parties that allowed for relatively free elections, rotation in government office and key interest group cooptation via material incentives for favoured organisations. But that arrangement purposely left little room for truly leftist or authentic working class representation, thereby overseeing and perpetuating deep-seated socio-economic inequalities. Cheap fuel and commodity imports subsidized by taxes on primary (mostly petroleum) exports served as the opiate of the masses that maintained social peace. But as years passed after the 1958 tripartite agreement that founded the modern Venezuelan Republic (the Pact de Punto Fijo), the elite compact eventually turned into an increasingly distant and corrupt political duopoly unresponsive to popular demands for change, leading to outbreaks of protest and even episodic guerrilla violence.

Attuned to this discontent, Army officer Hugo Chavez led abortive “colonel’s coups” in the 1990s that paved the way for his eventually successful run for the presidency in 1999. His campaign was staunchly anti-elitist, anti-imperialist and redistributionist, with major state agencies expanded or granted control over previously private agencies. That contributed to the rise of the indigenous-socialist movement that came to be known as Bolivarianism and which continued after the eventual transfer of power from Chavez to Maduro (Chavez’s vice-president and former union leader) upon the former’s death in 2014. The trouble is that Chavez and his Bolivarian cohorts’ managerial skills did not match their ideological ambitions, and after much public spending at home and abroad–something that did lift basic domestic socioeconomic indicators and forged international solidarity links with foreign anti-Western regimes for the first ten years of the Bolivarian experiment–the wheels began to come off the Venezuelan cart. Graft crept into the public sector while investment declined and public spending continued unchecked even as it was increasingly untethered from hard currency earnings. The Boliviarians began to emulate their predecessors when it came to bourgeois lifestyles, the main difference being that they preferred to wear khakis and red berets rather than Liki likis, guayaberas and flowered polleras.

Occasional observers of Latin American politics tend to blame much of the region’s history of political instability, especially when it comes to worldwide attention-grabbing events such as military coups or foreign interference, especially on the part of the United States. While it is historically undeniable that the United States has supported various dictators in their rise to power, and withdrawn support when this no longer seems of benefit or, in true neo-colonial fashion, opposed revolutionary movements wherever they arose, other factors including political polarisation, democratic backsliding, bureaucratic corruption and military intervention cannot solely be explained by external factors. Domestic forces of one kind or another always play a role: from the problems of policy deadlock associated with forms of government that combine presidentialism with multi-party legislatures, to the failure to instil cultures of accountability and transparency in private and public institutions, to deeply ingrained social and racial hierarchies underpinned by institutional legacies, to historical patterns of land ownership and other forms of commercial exchange, and more. 

That said, foreign involvement, if not outright intervention, is already an element in the politics surrounding the Venezuelan presidential election. Cuba has sent para-military advisors to bolster the Maduro regime by helping organise the violent “colectivos” of armed young men intimidating election workers and demonstrators.These are modelled on the Cuban “turbas divinas” mobs that emerge as counters to episodic protests on the island. Hezbollah (and Iran) has had a decades-long presence in Bolivarian Venezuela, providing a criminal-ideological nexus that triangulates weapons, drugs and money smuggling activities that extend from the Levant to the Tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay and which launder criminal as well as ideological assets under the protection of the Bolivarian State. More recently, Wagner Group mercenaries have appeared as part of Maduro’s personal guard, essentially playing the role of foreign praetorians for the besieged leader. It is a sign of his insecurity and lack of trust in his own forces that he now depends on the protection of these Russian proxies.

But the Opposition is in no real position to remove Maduro on is own even if it has the material, political and logistical support of foreign agencies. Hence, given the disarray in post-election civilian politics, and the inability of the PUD to dislodge the Maduro regime by weight of popular sentiment (and votes), it will be left to the Venezuelan military to ultimately determine the outcome of the current crisis. However, the Venezuelan military is not monolithic and is rendered by cronyism and corruption. Guarantees will have to be made and assurances given if military support for regime change is to occur (which will likely involve immunity from prosecution for graft and other acts of official malfeasance). Otherwise, the default option is to repress, which remains as a default because it is highly unlikely that any external forces (including the US) will overtly intervene in the event Maduro’s forces dig in and crack down on dissent. That sets the stage for more covert forms of subterfuge and grey area machinations, which will only prolong the impasse even if in somewhat sublimated fashion. And we can rest assured that these covert options are already being explored by various interested parties.

Whatever the eventual outcome, it will involve foreign actors supporting each side as well as soft-and hardliners in the PUD and PSUV ranks. In that light Maduro is at best just one rock in the road to a peaceful transition. At worst, he is now a pawn in a larger game that is beyond his control. In that light it is others with skin in the game that now matter most, and that includes the armed forces and foreign actors aligned on opposing sides of the Venezuelan political divide.

In terms of potential transition scenarios, the best that can be hoped for is the formation of a unity government made up of moderate elements of the outgoing regime and Opposition who commit to a military or perhaps internationally-overseen transition project leading to “restorative” elections down the road. The transition would focus on erecting an acceptable framework for political contestation while revitalising critical infrastructure, attracting investment and cushioning the dislocating effects of the economic crisis via promulgation of foreign aid-supported safety net programs for the most disadvantaged. All of that means that a variety of foreign interlocutors will need to be engaged on multiple policy fronts, starting with the political negotiations over procedures and paths forward and then moving onto substantive discussions about economic and social recovery planning. The Organisation of American States (OAS) may prove helpful in this regard even if its criticism of the Maduro regime has seen its representation at the election curtailed and stonewalled.

Returning to the political science angle, one way to envision the process is as a type of stylised multi-actor “game” in which the objective is to restore an open democracy to Venezuela. Any peaceful transition scenario to this end assumes that longer-sighted moderates will dominate negotiations on both sides of the domestic crisis and that their respective foreign backers will support such moderation over hard-line entrenchment and ongoing confrontation. That is a very big ask given the deep animosities extant between the adversaries. Again, the Venezuelan military will become a major focus of pressure from all sides, and it will ultimately be them who give the nod one way or the other. That is because the Venezuelan armed forces have one thing that no other stakeholder has: veto power over what is agreed to.

In a sense, the Venezuelan transition “game” boils down to a choice of lesser evil. That is true for Venezuelan society as a whole but especially true for the military as veto welders over the entire post-election process. Does the military choose the evil that it knows and which feeds it while continuing as the defenders of a failed State propped by like-minded foreign authoritarians, or does it take a step into the unknown and go with a side that has very patchy democratic credentials, very dubious foreign rightwing connections, but which is popular and represents the possibility of national recovery and renewal? Is continuity or change the better option, both for the military as an institution and for the nation as a whole?

Which is to say that there is much yet to happen before the Venezuelan crisis is resolved, peacefully or not. Or in antiseptic political science terms, the transitional “game” has moved from iterative (outcomes do not change with each successive play) to extensive-form in nature (outcomes change with each play), with the ultimate “foundational” conclusion leading to the next Venezuelan regime being uncertain and not necessarily Pareto (both sides advance their interests without hurting the other, leading to mutual second-best outcomes), much less Nash-optimal (both sides achieve preferred goals) for all concerned. That is to say, negotiations between and within the competing political blocs are not so much about immediate choices and outcomes but about setting the terms and conditions for an eventual resolution to the political impasse on terms that may not be the preferred result for anyone but which are mutually acceptable given the circumstances. It could even be a Pacto de Punto Fijo 2.0 moment, one that could be considered as a historical referent for current negotiations. It may seem like over-intellectualised gibberish to phrase things this way, but there is a core truth in this parsing of words that the principals involved may want to heed.

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Still the 5 Eyes Achilles Heel?

The National Cyber Security Centre (NZSC), a unit in the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) dedicated to cyber-security, has released a Review of its response to the 2021 email hacking of NZ members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC, a global organization of parliamentarians) and Professor Anne-Marie Brady, the well known China expert and critic. A number of problems were identified, both operational and (yet again) with regard to accountability and transparency, so I thought I would briefly summarise them.

The Review states that too much focus was placed by the NCSC on “technical” solutions to the email phishing probes instead of considering the “wider” context in which the hacking occurred. In layman’s terms that is akin to saying that the NCSC got busy plugging holes in the parliamentary server firewalls after breaches were detected without considering who was being targeted and what purpose the hacking may have served. This is remarkable because the hacking came from ATP-31, a unit linked to PRC military intelligence well known for having engaged in that sort of activity previously, in NZ and elsewhere. Moreover, the NCSC had to be alerted by a foreign partner that the email phishing efforts were part of a progressive hacking strategy whereby the ultimate target was not the emails of MPs but of the IP addresses that were being used by those MPs. In fact, the NCSC currently does not have procedures for how to respond to reports that foreign, including state-sponsored, actors are targeting New Zealanders. The NCSC found out about the parliamentary email servers hacking from Parliamentary Services in the first instance, and then from foreign partner intelligence that was passed on to it by the NZSIS.

This is of concern for several reasons, not the least of which is that it took a foreign 5 Eyes partner to alert the NCSC to something that it should have been well aware of itself (progressive hacking), and because the NCSC initially assumed, for whatever reason, that the phishing was done by ordinary criminals rather than foreign intelligence units. It also assumed that MPs were already engaged in providing their own security, even after Parliamentary Services flagged potential breaches of its email servers to the NCSC. In fact MPs were apparently told more by Parliamentary Services than the NCSC about their being targeted (albeit after the fact), and the University of Canterbury, Professor Brady’s employer, apparently was never contacted about potential security breaches of their servers.

Since MPs may have sent and received emails from multiple IP addresses attached to their official and personal devices, the security breach implications of the email hacks could be considerable given the potential cross-over between personal and official MP communications. Put bluntly, it is incredible that a dedicated cyber-security unit that is an integral part of the GCSB and through it the Anglophone 5 Eyes signals/technical intelligence network did not consider the membership of the targeted MPs in IPAC and that the phishing occurred at the same time that Professor Brady’s emails were targeted (Brady is known to have close contacts with IPAC). This is basic 1+1 contextual stuff when it comes to operational security in cyberspace, so one gets the sense that the NCSC is made up of computer nerds who have little training in geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations or how the world works outside of WAN and LAN (hint: these are basic computer terms). They simply approached the hacking attacks as if they were plugging a leaking dike rather than consider what may be prompting the leaks and red-flagging them accordingly.

The advice given by the Review was for the NCSC to engage more with the targeted individuals in real time, who only found out about their exposure long after the fact. Moreover, the Minister of Intelligence and Security was not briefed on these intrusions, much like the targeted MPs and Professor Brady were not. Again, this defies the notion of democratic oversight, transparency and accountability within NZ intelligence agencies. Worse yet, it follows on the heels of revelations that for a few years a decade ago the GCSB hosted a foreign partner “asset,” presumably a signals or technical intelligence collection platform, at GCSB headquarters in Wellington without the knowledge of the then Minister or even the GCSB Director-General. Operational control of that platform, including specific taskings and targets, were done by the foreign partner. Imagine if one of the taskings was to geotrack a foreign human target in order to eliminate that target. If word was leaked about GCSB’s hosting of the tracking platform, it might cause some diplomatic tensions for NZ. At a minimum it is a violation of both NZ’s sovereignty as well as basic notions of intelligence agency accountability in a democracy. It seems that, almost a decade later, the much vaunted reforms designed to increase intelligence community accountability embedded the 2017 Security and Intelligence Act had not filtered down to the NCSC dike-plugging level.

This is a very bad look for the GCSB, both in the eyes of its domestic clients as well as those of its 5 Eyes partners. NZ already had a reputation for being the “Achilles heel” or “weak link” of the 5 Eyes network due to its lax security protocols and counter-intelligence capabilities. This may only confirm that belief in spite fo significant efforts to upgrade GCSB capabilities and toughen up its defences, including in cyberspace. And, judging from the reactions of the targeted MPs and Professor Brady, domestic clients of the NCSC, who are both private and public in nature, may not feel too reassured by the Review and its recommendations.

It is known that the GCSB is made up of an assortment of engineers, translators and computing specialists. It has a remit that includes domestic as well as foreign signals and technical gathering and analysis, the former operating under the framework of NZ law under the 2017 Act (most often in a partnership with a domestic security agency).This brings up a question of note. If the staff are all of a “technical” persuasion as described above, then it follows that they simply adhere to directives from their managers and foreign partners, collect and assess signals and technical intelligence data as directed by others, and do not have an in-house capacity to provide geopolitical context to the data being analyzed. It is like plugging leaks without knowing about the hydraulics causing them.

In that light it just might do good to incorporate a few foreign policy and comparative political analysts into the GCSB/NCSC mix given that most of NZ’s threat environment is not only “intermestic” (domestic<–>international) but “glocal” (global and local) as well as hybrid (involving state and non-state actors) in nature. Threats are multidimensional and complex, so after the fact “plugging” solutions are temporary at best.

Given their diversity, complexity and sophistication, there are no “technical” solutions that can counter contemporary threats alone. Factoring in the broader context in which specific threats materialise will require broadening the knowledge base of those charged with defending against them or at a minimum better coordinating with other elements in the NZ intelligence community in order to get a better look at the bigger picture involved in NZ’s threat environment.

The NCSC in-house Review is silent on that.

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Media Link: Post-pandemic economics and the rise of national populism” on “A View from Afar.”

On this edition of AVFA Selwyn Manning and I discuss post-pandemic economics and the rise of national populism. It seems that a post-pandemic turn to more nationalist economic policies may have encouraged the rise of populists who use xenophobia and bigotry as a partisan tool by adding non-economic fear-mongering and scapegoating to the necessity of shifting to more inwards-looking structural reform. You can find the show here.

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Differentiating between democracy and republic.

Although NZ readers may not be that interested in the subject and in lieu of US Fathers Day missives (not celebrated in NZ), I thought I would lay out some brief thoughts on a political subject being debated in the US. It seems crazy but there seems to be some confusion on what a the terms “democracy” and “republic” mean.

There are (MAGA) right-wingers and conservative media commentators who claim that the US is a Republic, not a Democracy. They are either cynical or ignorant. The two are not antithetical. Democracy is a means of giving political voice, selecting political representatives and granting social (and often economic) equality. It comes from the Latin word “demos,” or polity.

Republics (from the Latin res publica) are a type of political governance where, unlike monarchies or other forms of oligarchical rule, leadership purportedly derives from or is delegated by the sovereign will of the people (which may/may not be voiced democratically). There are democratic republics and there are authoritarian republics, so the two terms–democracy and republic–while having different specific meanings, may or may not be overlapped when it comes to a given political framework.

In fact, as the old saying goes, any country with “democratic” in its name is likely not regardless of whether it has “Republic” in its title. For example, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) is anything but. The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) holds elections (in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)), but is certainly not democratic in the liberal (universal, free, fair and transparent elections) sense of the term. Argentina under its dictatorships remained a “Republica Federal.” In fact, Republics can be federal in nature, where political administration is decentralized and broken into constituent parts such as US or Brazilian states, or unitary in nature, where the central government has administrative jurisdiction over the entire country (as in NZ). In neither case does this necessarily involve democracy as a concept or practice. It is simply a type of governmental administration within given territorial limits, to which different types of political voice, representation and accountability are attached.

Again, democracy is about political expression and social equality; republic is about political organisation. The US was founded and has been broadened via much struggle and conflict as a democratic republic (first for some, eventually for all). The process involved two parallel processes that were not always congruent or synchronised, which consequently has led to repeated conflict (think Civil War and the Civil Rights movement). In fact, the broadening of “democratic” rights within the US over the years has produced backlash from small and large-R “republicans” who believe that the awarding of rights to previously marginalised groups and non-citizens somehow infringes on their existing rights (which assumes that “rights” are an indivisible pie where awarding some to one group means that other groups will lose their fair or previously allotted share). This has extended into discussions of “states rights” versus those accorded by US federal law, where advocates of the Republic versus Democracy designation argue against democracy because it interferes with State’s autonomy over their internal (political, economic and social) affairs. In this view, a US Republic leaves the issue of individual and collective rights to be decided by States under their own self-made laws. Democracy removes that prerogative by federal fiat, subjugating states to the dictates of a federal overseers (who in turn are seen as pawns or tools of nefarious elites). This view is deeply flawed, if not dishonest.

The “states versus feds” debate has been rehashed endlessly and largely settled as a matter of US constitutional law. Despite ongoing efforts by groups like the Federalist Society to redefine the relationship between the central government and states, it has never really been framed as a “Republic versus Democracy” issue. But in the hands of malevolent or ignorant actors, this adversarial distinction contributes to the false dichotomy between and binary juxtaposition of the two different but often compatible terms.

It would be a pity if the narrative that democracy is antithetical to being a republic begins to take larger hold in the US in the lead-up to the November elections. Perhaps some of those who espouse such a view really would prefer that the US become an authoritarian republic. But what the very presence of such views does show is that when it comes to fundamental concepts underpinning the US political order, there sure are a lot of misinformed if not downright stupid people out there–and plenty of others who wish to exploit their ignorance for myopic partisan gain.

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Media Link: AVFA on post-colonial blowback.

Selwyn Manning and I discuss varieties of post colonial blowback and the implications its has for the rise of the Global South. Counties discussed include Palestine/Israel, France/New Caledonia, England/India, apartheid/post-apartheid South Africa and post-colonial New Zealand. It is a bit of a ramble but it raises some infrequently discussed points. You can find the episode here.

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Te Pati Loco?

Normally I would not write about Maori issues. I may have been living in NZ for over 25 years but I do not feel that it is my place to opine because I am not an expert on Maori history and politics and do not speak Te Reo (because as anyone who seriously studies comparative politics will attest, foreign language proficiency is a bottom line requirement for scholarship in the field unless you only study countries and cultures that speak your mother tongue). Hence in the past I deferred to Lew to write about Maori issues here at KP, but since he has departed there is no one left to do so.

However, in light of the recent carkoi and protests organised by Te Pati Maori (TPM) in response to the Coalition of Cruelty’s budget, I thought I would touch briefly on a matter of Te Pati Maori praxis. I was dragged into the debate about the protests when I noted on social media that the use of the term “strike” to characterise the direct action was done in error or for dramatic effect since “strike” is codified in employment law as a collective withholding of labour services by employees from employers in the context of workplace disputes. If the labour service withdrawal is called by collective agents and follows the procedures for engaging in such action (giving notice, etc.) then it is a strike “proper.” if it is done by individuals or groups of workers without collective authorization, then it is a “wildcat” strike that may be deemed unlawful by employment courts. A general strike is a labour service withdrawal across economic sectors done for economic and/or political purposes, which is difficult because it requires unity of purpose and action by employees working in different productive areas, which in turn requires agreement between union agents and agent/principal agreement in every union on the action. That is a big ask.

Taking a day off from work to go to a protest, be it by using paid, unpaid or medical leave or no leave at all is not a strike no matter what one calls it. Workers assume the employment risks associated with such actions. Employers can weigh their responses according to the law and their relationship with employees. That could even include giving people the day off or paying them overtime to stay on the job, among other options. Again, the nature of the relationship between boss and worker outside of the legal framework can influence an employer’s response for better or worse.

I figured that since I have written two books and a dozen or so scholarly articles about comparative labour relations, including the subject of strikes and State responses to working class collective action, that my neutral if pedantic observation about the proper use of the term “strike” would be as unremarkable as it was incontrovertible. I was wrong.

To be sure, the use of the term “strike” in the Te Pati Maori protest literature, which explicitly references it as a display of Maori economic power, lent itself to the view that Maori were going on strike. As such, right-wingers seized on the term to call for employer retaliation against those who joined the protests. There was much agitation on the Right about violations of contract (individual or collective) and the penalties that should be levied. The PM weighed in with the comment that workers should be careful about striking and that strikes should be done on weekends because that way they would not be as disruptive.

Besides the fact that a PM should know the difference between a strike and a protest (rather than cynically feed into the “strike” narrative), it is pretty rich for him to suggest that strikes are best done on weekends. As I said on social media, by that logic we should take our holidays on weekends as well. The whole point of strikes, protests, demonstrations and other types of direct action is precisely to be disruptive of the status quo as given in defence of a cause or to air grievances. A protest without disruption is like an army without a fight, full of rebels with causes but no stomach for consequences. Protests and strikes are about assuming collective and individual risk. The risk may be large or small depending on circumstance, but in one way or another it hangs over acts of “unauthorised” direct action in most every instance.

Having said all of that, I understand the call to strike in the Te Pati Maori literature as using the original sense of the term, which means “to deliver a blow.” The protest was organised as a symbolic blow against the reactionary anti-Maori thrust of the Coalition of Cruelty’s policies. It was not about Maori labour service withdrawals per se.

For my troubles in clarifying what is and what is not a strike and how the term was misused in the call to action by both supporters and opponents of the protests, I was called condescending, paternalistic, pompous, a lightweight, and best of all, a “racist c**t,” the latter by a lady who surely must kiss her mum and perhaps children with that mouth. As I wrote to her, she must be fun to be around.

All of that aside, I then got the pleasure of watching Te Pati Maori leaders speak in and outside of Parliament on the subject of the protest and much more. Although Ms.Ngarwera-Packer presented her views coolly, her counterpart Mr. Waititi was at his bombastic, hyperbolic best, taking the tradition of Marae oratory to a level that even that tax-funded weiner-tugger Shane Jones cannot match. He threw out gems such as “if Maori are 60 percent of the prison population then (we) deserve 60 percent of the Corrections budget,” a feat of logic so extraordinary that it would be akin to saying that NZ should pay the PRC, Russia and rightwing extremists most of the intelligence budget because they are the ones being spied on. To be frank, I have always found Mr. Waititi to be a bit of a buffoon and charlatan, but then again, that is probably the old Pakeha racist codger in me doing the assessment (I have been characterised as such before).

Which is why I paused to reflect on my reaction to his rants. Others have already noted the hypocrisy of TPM being funded by taxpayers and gaining prominence via “Pakeha” procedures and institutions. They have noted with alarm the seditious rhetoric of Mr. Waititi’s wife, the daughter of none other than that paragon of indigenous resistance, John Tamihere (although Mr. Tamihere’s management of the Waiparera Trust, for whatever its faults, was first rate during the pandemic and is widely respect in the West Auckland community). Now the TPM is calling for a separate Maori parliament, presumably to run in parallel to the “Pakeha” parliament and be equal to it. I am not sure how it will be funded and what outcomes it hopes to achieve, but it provides some food for thought about political alternatives even if it has a snowball’s chance in hell of materialising while the current government is in power.

The proposal is interesting in part because one of the features of a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) democratic system like that in NZ is that it allows small, narrow-focused or single issue parties to get elected and press their interests within parliament, using coalition-building and vote-trading as a means of doing so. The ACT and Green Parties started out this way and have now widened their political appeals beyond their original core policy platforms. Whether that is for better or worse is for others to decide, but the general thrust for both of them was to start narrow and then widen their platforms via the incorporation of other agenda items and constituencies. ACT has gone with the gun rights crowd, incels and racists; the Greens have gone with identity issues, animal rights and rainbows. Both have had success by doing so. NZ First has done something a bit different, using malleable nationalist populism as a vehicle for Winston Peter’s political aspirations. To his original xenophobia and self-loathing Maori appeal (to blue rinse Pakehas), he has now added anti-vaccination conspiracy weirdness and slavish “anti-woke” corporate bootlicking to the party repertoire. Like the broadening shifts undergone by ACT and the Greens, it has served his party well and allowed it and ACT to become the tail-wagging rump ends of the Coalition of Cruelty dog.

Te Pati Maori is a different kettle of fish. Gone are the days of Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia, who tried to play the centrist–some might say assimilationist–parliamentary game.They supported both Labour and National-led governments while confining themselves to practical pursuit of “reasonable” goals, that is, objectives that could be achieved by and within the system as given. Truth be told, the Maori Party record was mixed at best, but one thing that did come out of its emergence on the political scene is that outside of Maori-related issues (say, rural health and lower-income welfare support), it had zero to little impact on NZ government policy. The “big” policy decisions were made by Pakeha-dominated parties, including things like foreign and defence policy (I wrote about the Maori Party’s lack of consequence in NZ foreign policy other than on international indigenous affairs in this scholarly article).

Today’s Te Pati Maori is different. More than a just a party name change, it is overtly anti-Establishment and “progressive” in orientation (whatever “progressive” means to them, which may not be what other “progressives” think that they are). As the proposed Maori parliament suggests, TPM rejects the system as given. That is why it uses the word “strike” without regard to the Pakeha convention known as Employment Law. It’s spokespeople openly speak of “revolution” and government overthrow even if it is unclear what they actually mean when they use those terms. What is clear is that TPM is more about political theatre and symbolic politics than delivering tangible policy outcomes to and for their constituents. If anything, its marginalization within the political system has increased along with its militant rhetoric and actions. It might be too early to tell, but the carkoi protests could be seen in that light: as a lot of bluster and fanfare but no tangible impact or results to show for them. In fact, the response from most other parties was to either lambaste or shrug and ignore Te Pati Maori’s antics. Time will tell if the impact of the protests are more subtle and longer-term in nature but for the moment TPM stands alone, seemingly barking into the wind.

Again, that got me wondering as I stopped to check my white privilege. Am I being unkind to TPM? Or am I just another racist cracker bleating about the rise of a righteous and strong indigenous voice?

I found my answer in Gramsci. It occurs to me that, because TMP often refers to its actions and rationales in neo-Marxist terms with a smattering of Paulo Freire, Franz Fanon and Norm Chomsky thrown in, that Te Pati Maori sees itself waging a war of position within the “trenches” of the NZ Pakeha State. That is to say, it is working from within to disseminate its “counter-hegemonic” vision and policy prescriptions in civil and political society. Its focus is on grassroots organising, starting with Maori and reaching out from there into other “progressive” communities such as those grouped under the Green and Left Labour banners. It is not worried about converting the old Pakeha elites or engaging in parliamentary compromises because, as the recent census shows, Maori are growing in demographic numbers while Pakeha are declining. Given the structure of MMP, that growth can translate into increased seats in whatever parliament they chose to stand in, and given the youth appeal that they presently feel that they have, time is on their side. Along with forging alliances within the Labour and Green parties, unions and other civil society organisations, TPM is using a long-game strategy where what it is doing now sows the seeds for its successes down the road.

They may not be so loco after all.

So what to make of Te Pati Maori? Are they just nuts (as the term “loco” implies)? Are they communists, extremists and separatists as Winston First and Tugger Jones claim them to be? I would argue no to both suggestions. What TPM is doing is a time-honoured yet new form of politics in a social media age, where their theatrics are part of a grassroots appeal to marginalised and disaffected (not always the same) groups, especially proletarians of colour. By working “in the trenches” TPM can slowly promote an ideological re-orientation away from neoliberal vestiges (because neoliberalism is not just an economic doctrine but has become over the course of two generations a social construct that frames our way of life) and towards a type of post-modern indigenous-centric perspective infused with working class-based values and perspectives. This view is self-realised and awake rather than woke, defiant but not always disrespectful, confrontational but not conflictual, independent rather than (Pakeha) dependent, cooperative and collective rather than corporate in organization. It may take time for the TPM-led movement to congeal, but the stirrings are there and the people are ready for generational change to take effect. That is the plan and TPM sees itself as the instrument for converting that plan into praxis.

Or so they hope.

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Media Link: AVFA on the implications of US elections.

In this week’s “A View from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and spoke about the upcoming US elections and what the possibility of another Trump presidency means for the US role in world affairs. We also spoke about the problems Joe Biden has in dominating the presidential race against a demonstrably unbalanced opponent, shifting voter demographics, how US allies and adversaries engage in strategic hedging depending on whether they view Trump as an asset or as a threat, and how the US increasingly looks like an unstable polity, to the point that US foreign interlocutors must factor in its growing unreliability as an international partner. And much more. The link is here.