Singapore is the wrong model for NZ’s foreign policy

Opinion: Writing in the New Zealand Herald this year, former Prime Minister Helen Clark and former National Party leader Don Brash have weighed in on New Zealand’s foreign policy, warning against our participation in the Aukus technology-sharing partnership with Australia, the UK, and the US.
In a joint statement released on July 16, Clark and Brash have doubled down on their viewpoint, responding in detail to an interview Prime Minister Christopher Luxon gave to the Financial  Times. Their claim is that the Prime Minister’s statements “orient New Zealand towards being a full-fledged military ally of the United States, with the implication that New Zealand will increasingly be dragged into US-China competition, including militarily in the South China Sea.” They also argue the interview strongly suggests Luxon has abandoned New Zealand’s independent foreign policy.
Clark and Brash’s commentary is timely and important. What are their foreign policy recommendations? Brash and Clark contend that New Zealand has only two options in navigating its foreign policy. In their view, “the first is the one that the US wants to see, where New Zealand is much more explicitly tied into the American orbit”. The second is “the Singapore model” of foreign policy, with its mix of security cooperation with the US short of a formal alliance treaty and strong trade ties with China.
The Singapore model argument has some plausibility. Singapore and New Zealand are small trading states dependent on an open world economy. Both enjoy a robust security cooperation relationship with the US, even while having China as their top trade partner.
Nevertheless, structural differences in the two countries’ foreign policy and domestic politics suggests the Singapore model does not travel well to the New Zealand context.   
First, unlike Singapore which has never had a formal bilateral alliance, formal security treaty ties with Australia continue to be a central feature in New Zealand’s foreign policy. Wellington’s alliance with Canberra rests on the sturdy platform of the 1944 Canberra Pact and the Australian-New Zealand component of the Anzus treaty of 1951.
For the Clark-Brash argument to be convincing, they need to explain their vision for New Zealand’s foreign policy in a context where – like Singapore – we have no treaty alliance.
In a hypothetical post-Australia-New Zealand alliance world, security concerns will not disappear. Fallback options to ensure security would then include non-alignment and possibly even a foreign policy stance of neutrality.
Whatever the pros and cons of those options, the point is this brings us even further away from the Singapore model. Singapore balances the absence of a formal bilateral alliance treaty with a non-aligned diplomatic status and a formidable military. The Southeast Asian state is a formal member of the Non-Aligned Movement and spends nearly 3 percent of its gross domestic product on its military. New Zealand is not a member of this movement and the current defence spend is substantially lower at 1.2 percent of GDP.
Second, there is a structural difference between Singapore and New Zealand’s domestic political systems, which affects foreign policy making, and specifically in how each country can plausibly be expected to interact with China.
An example will help illustrate this point. In 2017, the Singaporean government terminated the employment contract and the residency of a non-Singaporean Professor at the National University of Singapore. Professor Huang Jing  was required to leave Singapore after he was judged to have acted as “an agent of influence” on behalf of a foreign government.
Reports emerged that Huang had passed a far-from-benign back-channel message from the Chinese government to the Singaporean leadership after a crisis in relations over Singapore’s South China Sea policy. He now teaches at a university in China.
This example underlines the point that Singapore’s political system offers it foreign policy options that are difficult to envision being applied in New Zealand’s very different political context. Indeed, it is very possible that what may work well for Singapore may have very different effects for New Zealand.   
Whatever decision is made about New Zealand’s role in Aukus Pillar II membership, it will represent the most significant foreign policy development since the breakdown of the US-New Zealand leg of the Anzus alliance in the 1980s. 
To do justice to the gravity of the decision, we must take care in our discussions to avoid the allure of flawed analogies such as that represented by a Singapore model for New Zealand foreign policy.