The land of the long white house. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images; collage by Jason Stretch
The land of the long white house. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images; collage by Jason Stretch

PoliticsMay 31, 2022

Helen Clark on Jacinda Ardern at the White House – how it works and why it matters now

The land of the long white house. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images; collage by Jason Stretch
The land of the long white house. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images; collage by Jason Stretch

Ahead of the meeting with President Biden, a former New Zealand prime minister tells Toby Manhire what she learned from her two Oval Office encounters, and why the priority must be preventing the world from splitting into ‘two hostile camps’.

A meeting with President Joe Biden was only inked into Jacinda Ardern’s diary a few days after she’d arrived in America, but there will be nothing impromptu about the encounter itself. The 26th official visit by a New Zealand prime minister to the White House, scheduled for late Tuesday morning in Washington DC (around 3am on Wednesday in New Zealand), will be “highly choreographed”, former prime minister Helen Clark told The Spinoff. “You don’t wing these meetings. It’s not an informal chat.”

Clark knows what she’s talking about. In March 2002, in the shadow of 9/11, she met President George W Bush in the Oval Office – a meeting repeated five years later. As is typical with New Zealand prime ministers, she stayed at Blair House, otherwise known as “the president’s guest house”, which sits just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. (The exception is Peter Fraser, who in 1942 was given a bedroom in the White House itself.) By the time she was ushered into the Oval Office, the key people had a good idea of what was about to be discussed. 

George Bush and Helen Clark on March 26, 2002, at the White House. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The visiting New Zealand prime minister could expect the embassy in Washington DC to “have a clear readout of what the president is likely to say”, said Clark. “They’ll have a line to someone in the White House, and the New Zealand side will have signalled what New Zealand is going to say.” A smattering of small talk out of the way, the prime minister would move straight to the prepared lines. Any attempt to improvise “could lead to making commitments which stray from New Zealand’s core interests”, said Clark. “What one says needs to be well scripted in advance to be of maximum value to New Zealand.”

Discipline and “focused preparation” was critical because of the small window of time. The meeting and the photo-op that followed it would probably need to wind up within half an hour or 45 minutes, reckoned Clark. “It’s got to be bang, bang, bang. You need to be going in and making your points.” 

George Bush and Helen Clark in the same Oval Office spot on March 21, 2007. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

That preparation would extend to picking what the other guy will say. New Zealand officials would prepare Ardern by throwing the expected Biden talking points at her, so that by the time the meeting gets under way she had “prepared considered responses to them … so there are no surprises”.

A core theme of bilateral discussions during Clark’s visits was rebuilding a relationship that had remained strained since New Zealand was “put in the dogbox” and suspended from Anzus over the decision to go nuclear-free during the Lange government. Her task had been to put the countries back “on a more professional footing”.

As Biden and Ardern meet, the place of the Pacific in a tussle between the US and China for economic and geopolitical influence is in the headlines. The New Zealand prime minister could add “nuance” to a delicate international balance that risked slipping into a binary west versus the rest mentality, said Clark. With Russia having “made itself a pariah state” through its invasion of Ukraine, the danger was in beginning to “treat China in the same way”. It was “in New Zealand’s interests, and the interests of western countries in general” to avoid “acting in a way that leads to a division into camps – then we’d really have problems”.

As China’s foreign minister tours the Pacific Islands signing deals and Biden breaks with the “strategic ambiguity” stance to pledge the US would intervene militarily should Beijing move aggressively against Taiwan, the challenge for Ardern was to show solidarity with the US while remaining a friend to Beijing – to “bring the context and nuance of how you engage with China”.

Ardern is expected to reiterate in her meeting with Biden New Zealand’s enthusiasm for the United States to join the CPTPP – the trade deal formerly known as the TPP – which American negotiators were instrumental in negotiating before Donald Trump withdrew as one of his first acts as president. Despite the domestic politics that made it unpalatable and Biden’s pursuit instead of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, Ardern needed to firmly make the case for the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, for greater access to US markets for exporters. “New Zealand can be pretty blunt in saying that,” said Clark. 

There was likely to be some engagement on gun law reform, an issue which dominated the early days of Ardern’s visit as the US recoiled from yet another mass shooting in a school. But with the politics in Congress paralysed, the reality was that “Biden, like Obama before him, is absolutely stymied, so the outrage will go on”, said Clark.

The turnout for the meeting from the president’s cabinet could offer a clue as to the importance of the meeting from the US point of view, said Clark. Kamala Harris’s attendance has already been signalled – the others that would make up a “full bench” are secretary of state Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and defense secretary Lloyd Austin.

In his study of New Zealand prime ministers’ White House trips, foreign policy analyst Ken Ross has suggested they are essentially about “diplomatic chemistry”. John Key, the most recent prime minister to visis the Oval Office (in 2011 and 2014) has observed that the most important meetings for building a relationship with a US president tend to come on the sidelines of multilateral summits. 

But Clark, echoing Key, says White House are “critical” beyond the ceremony and symbolism. “It matters because New Zealand has interests. And we would like the US to be more open to New Zealand than it has been. We have interests and we need to register them and show we’re across the geopolitics, to re-engage that diplomatic toolbox.” Today, with international institutions fragile and stability strained, New Zealand needed to seek out “the issues-based coalitions that enable us to work as an international community”, she said. “Across climate, oceans, biodiversity and pandemic response – the world would grind to a halt if driven into two hostile camps.”

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Ferdinand Marcos Jr arrives  for his proclamation as the Philippines president in Manila on May 25 (Photo: Ted Aljibe/AFP via Getty Images; additional design Archi Banal)
Ferdinand Marcos Jr arrives for his proclamation as the Philippines president in Manila on May 25 (Photo: Ted Aljibe/AFP via Getty Images; additional design Archi Banal)

OPINIONPoliticsMay 31, 2022

Why did NZ Filipinos vote overwhelmingly to return the Marcos dynasty to power?

Ferdinand Marcos Jr arrives  for his proclamation as the Philippines president in Manila on May 25 (Photo: Ted Aljibe/AFP via Getty Images; additional design Archi Banal)
Ferdinand Marcos Jr arrives for his proclamation as the Philippines president in Manila on May 25 (Photo: Ted Aljibe/AFP via Getty Images; additional design Archi Banal)

While they reap the benefits of living in a liberal democracy, what compels those who left behind a country brutalised by the Marcoses to give them another chance? A deep-seated and insidious cynicism, argues Monica Macansantos.

At a campaign rally in my hometown for Leni Robredo, a candidate in the recently concluded presidential elections in the Philippines, I could feel a palpable sense of hope in the air – rare in a country that views politicians running on a platform of reform with scepticism, if not outright derision. Volunteers and attendees shared food and drink, exchanged smiles and words of kindness with complete strangers, and made way for each other instead of shoving people aside to secure a better view of the stage (a habit that’s common in the Philippines, and which Filipinos themselves are quite aware of).

There was a shared sense that we had finally gotten our act together as a people, consciously shedding our self-serving habits that have undergirded a culture of corruption in our country. This was because we had found a leader to rally behind, a woman whose untarnished record as a public servant and selfless devotion to grassroots causes had given us permission to believe that a better future for our nation was finally within our reach. 

A supporter of presidential runner-up Leni Robredo holds a sign alluding to the martial law years during a rally in Manila on May 13 (Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

“Walang pag-asa ang Pilipinas” (there’s no hope for the Philippines) is a line I’ve heard from many Filipinos who have become resigned to the seemingly unending cycle of corruption and mismanagement in which our nation has been mired, even after a popular uprising ousted Ferdinand Marcos and his kleptocratic family from power in 1986. It’s the kind of resignation that I found especially pronounced in Filipino immigrants I met while living in New Zealand and the United States, many of whom would habitually deride our shared homeland if only to justify their decision to leave.

Every attempt to tackle corruption and poverty back home under the leadership of more progressive and democratic leaders was usually met with scepticism, even ridicule, by many Filipino immigrants I met. For many of them, it was silly to take tangible steps towards ensuring a better future for our countrymen, to even believe it was possible to redeem a system that was, in their eyes, irredeemably broken. 

This was one of the reasons why I was shocked by the widespread support I saw for outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte from the same sceptical Filipinos who’d tell me “walang pag-asa ang Pilipinas”. For reasons I struggled to comprehend, they saw hope for our nation in Duterte’s promises as president to kill all drug addicts and fatten the fish of Manila Bay with their corpses. A good friend of mine and ardent Duterte supporter told me, when we met on the streets of Wellington, that Leila de Lima, an opposition senator leading an investigation into Duterte’s extrajudicial killings, “should just shoot herself”. I wasn’t completely sure what brought even close friends to embrace the darkness and nihilism that Duterte preached with his words and deeds, but there seemed to be, at least to me, a deep-seated cynicism that prevented these people from seeing a future for our nation that wasn’t mired in death and destruction. 

Supporters of Ferdinand ‘BBM’ Marcos Jr cheer outside of his Manila headquarters as results rolled in on May 10 (Photo: Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images)

Ferdinand Marcos Jr, popularly known in the Philippines by his nickname Bongbong or “BBM”, won the Filipino overseas vote, winning by a landslide in New Zealand and losing narrowly to Robredo in Australia. I believe that this sense of cynicism that’s pervasive in Filipino immigrant communities played a role in their election of a convicted tax evader who has never acknowledged or apologised for the widespread human rights abuses committed by his family. Belonging to a society in which corruption and dishonesty are rife, thanks in part to Marcos Sr’s 20 years of kleptocratic rule, many Filipinos at home and overseas automatically expect corruption and dishonesty from their leaders.

My guess is that what makes Marcos Jr different from “everybody else”, as far as his supporters are concerned, is that he carries with him a legacy of authoritarianism inherited from his late father and celebrated by his mother (the notorious Imelda Marcos whom, I kid you not, is still alive). His supporters truly believe that this kind of government, which leaves no room for dissent when its leaders abuse their powers and holds zero regard for the sanctity of human life, will cleanse our country of its many ills. Their masochistic desire to give the Marcoses another chance makes me wonder about the full extent of their confusion and rage amid our struggles to rebuild a democracy that the Marcoses left in ruin. Their rage has become irrational and violent, allowing them to lend their unabashed support for Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror over the Filipino people through his bloody war on drugs.

What disappoints me is the strong support authoritarianism receives from many Filipinos in New Zealand, who left the Philippines after the Marcos family impoverished and brutalised it, and who nonetheless choose fascists like Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte to lead the country they left behind while reaping the benefits of living in a liberal democracy. Wilfully blind to the flaws and abuses of their heroes, some would ask me, upon hearing that I was writing a novel for my creative writing PhD about the Marcos regime in the 70s and 80s, if I was correcting the “widespread lies” about Marcos Sr being a corrupt and murderous dictator. The same people would stake their hopes in Duterte to “cleanse our homeland of all the drug addicts and communists that hinder our progress”. In the comforts of a democratic, prosperous New Zealand where they would have been given due process if wrongly accused, they could conveniently forget how easy it would have been for them to be mistakenly labelled a drug addict or “communist” if they lived in Duterte’s Philippines. 

About a week ago, a former student now living in Sydney sent me Facebook screenshots of Filipinos planning to hold a big celebration in Sydney for Marcos Jr’s win. One woman even celebrated the predicted collapse of the Philippine peso under another Marcos presidency, because this would mean the strengthening of the Australian dollar against the peso which would make it “easier to live like royalty in the Philippines now, if our Australian dollars can buy more pesos”. I can’t see how anyone else could celebrate the impending economic collapse of their homeland, if it weren’t for an insidious cynicism that has crept into their bodies and squeezed all the remaining traces of goodness and hope from their hearts. Such callousness ultimately leads to self-destruction, or in the case of many Filipinos overseas, an implosion they can witness comfortably from afar, preferably with a nice glass of Otago pinot noir.