New Zealand Signs Up for Trump's War of Aggression

In a move that can only be described as complicity in an illegal war, the Luxon government has added New Zealand's name to a joint statement calling on Iran to cease its closure of the Strait of Hormuz and declaring the signatories ready "to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait."

The language sounds measured, even bureaucratic. It is neither. Examined carefully, the statement represents a significant departure from this country's independent foreign policy tradition, and it was made in the service of a war New Zealand had no hand in starting and no business joining.

The context is not complicated, whatever the government's communications staff might prefer. 

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran, killing the Supreme Leader and targeting nuclear sites, civilian and military installations. Iran responded by returning fire and closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately twenty percent of the world's seaborne oil normally passes. The US then launched a military and propaganda campaign to reopen the strait. New Zealand signed a statement expressing its willingness to assist with that effort. The causal chain here is not ambiguous.

What, precisely, did Luxon commit the country to? The joint statement expresses a readiness to contribute to "appropriate efforts," which is language deliberately vague enough to mean almost anything while binding the signatories to a political position that is entirely clear. Within days, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was telling Fox News that the signatory countries were working to "implement President Trump's vision" of reopening the strait. Rutte named New Zealand explicitly, alongside Australia, Japan, South Korea, the UAE and the NATO alliance itself.

On Tuesday, the ODT reported:

Peters denies NZ has signed up to secure Strait of Hormuz

Over the weekend, the government joined 19 other countries in condemning Iranian attacks on commercial ships in the Gulf.

In a collective statement, the countries including the United Kingdom and Germany, expressed "deep concern" about the escalating conflict. The statement also expressed its signatories would be ready "to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait".

They called on Iran to immediately cease threats, laying mines, drone and missile attacks and other attempts to block commercial vessels from travelling through the Strait of Hormuz.

Winston Peters, cornered, insisted that Rutte had "probably been misinformed" and that the statement was "specifically narrow." Christopher Luxon attempted to clarify that any actual contribution would still require Cabinet approval. These reassurances collapse under scrutiny. A foreign minister cannot sign a document on behalf of his country and then disclaim what the document's chief proponent says it means.

The statement exists. New Zealand's name is on it. The framing of the exercise, as Donald Trump's vision being collectively implemented, was provided by the Secretary-General of NATO.

The legal position deserves examination. New Zealand's participation in any military operation would ordinarily require a United Nations mandate. No such mandate exists here. Labour leader Chris Hipkins was correct to note this plainly in Parliament, observing that the commitment was broad and that any support should follow a UN mandate that has not been sought. The UN Secretary-General called for the strait to be opened through multilateral means. The US-led operation is proceeding without that multilateral foundation. New Zealand's statement of readiness to contribute aligns the country with an unlawful, unilateral military enterprise, dressed in the language of freedom of navigation.

This is where Five Eyes becomes relevant. New Zealand's intelligence-sharing obligations under that arrangement have long created an asymmetry in this country's capacity for genuine foreign policy independence. When our signals intelligence apparatus is woven into a shared network dominated by Washington, "independence" in practice often means independence on issues Washington does not care about. The Hormuz crisis is an issue Washington cares very much about. The pressure on Five Eyes partners to close ranks is structural, not merely diplomatic.

The government's preferred framing is that New Zealand's concern is purely economic: fuel security, supply chains, cost of living. These are real concerns, and the closure of the strait has caused genuine hardship. But the remedy for an energy crisis created by a war that the United States started is not to join that war. New Zealand's fuel vulnerability is not Iran's doing. It is the consequence of the US-Israeli strikes, launched without New Zealand's knowledge or consent, in the name of a strategic agenda this country has never endorsed.

 

There is a direct line from Luxon's signature on that joint statement to the Trump administration's campaign to reshape the Middle East by force. The government wants to describe that line as dotted, provisional, not yet fully binding, like a contract initialled but not yet executed, subject to Cabinet review before anything concrete follows. It is not dotted. Signing a joint statement alongside a number of other allied countries, which was then cited by the NATO Secretary-General as evidence of collective support for Trump's strategic "vision" isn't provisional in any meaningful political sense.

The commitment was made the moment New Zealand's name appeared on the document. Cabinet approval for any subsequent military deployment is a domestic procedural step, but it does not undo the political signal already sent to Washington, NATO, and Tehran. That signal is one of solidarity with a military operation that lacks UN authorisation, serves American and Israel's strategic interests only, and has already cost thousands of innocent lives. New Zealand should not be on that list, and the government has not yet honestly explained to the public why it chose to put us there.

It is little wonder, then, that faced with mounting domestic criticism, Peters moved to try and distance himself from the implications of what he had already signed. A foreign minister who endorses a collective statement of military readiness on a Friday and spends the following Tuesday insisting it means nothing of the sort has not changed the country's position. He has merely changed his description of the government's support for an illegal war.

Also on Tuesday, RNZ reported:

Winston Peters says New Zealand not 'rushing to contribute military forces to this conflict'

The Foreign Minister says people shouldn't be alarmed that "somehow we're going to be engaged in some military exercise" following statements by the head of NATO including New Zealand as one of 22 countries "coming together" to secure the Strait of Hormuz.

It comes as Labour raises concerns about the "broad nature" of a joint statement New Zealand was part of over the weekend, and what the commitment may open the country up to.

Winston Peters said there had been "scaremongering" from critics who say the government is "rushing to contribute military forces to this conflict".

"What absolute crap, what absolute nonsense - New Zealand is not a party to this conflict, and we have absolutely no intention of joining it," he said at Parliament on Tuesday. 

  

What we are witnessing is the collision of three failures of political character. Donald Trump, having launched an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign state without UN authorisation, is now leaning on smaller allies to launder his campaign as a collective enterprise. Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government has conducted an extensive project of regional destruction, has found in Trump an accomplice willing to undertake what previous administrations would not start. And here in Wellington, Luxon and Peters have obliged them both, attaching New Zealand's name to their unjustifiable war of aggression and then, when challenged, pretending they had done no such thing.

Peters' assurance that New Zealand has "absolutely no intention" of joining the conflict would carry more weight if he had not already signed a document expressing readiness to do exactly that. These are not statesmen navigating a crisis. They are politicians managing a communications problem, while the bodies mount and the fires burn, and New Zealand's good name is spent in the service of an empire that does not particularly care about our country at all.

The GST Windfall Willis Doesn't Want You to Know About

When a Finance Minister invokes the authority of Treasury, the public is generally entitled to assume that what follows is an accurate rendering of the advice received. That assumption, it appears, does not hold in the case of Nicola Willis and her recent remarks on GST, fuel prices, and the fiscal consequences of the global oil shock caused by Trump's illegal war on Iran.

Speaking in the wake of the Strait of Hormuz disruption that has pushed 91 octane petrol to around $3.30 per litre nationally, with some Auckland forecourts already touching $4.00, Willis offered the following reassurance when questioned about a potential GST windfall for the Crown.

Here's Nicola Willis' 24 March post on Facebook:

Many Kiwis have asked me if the Government will receive windfall tax-gains as a result of rising fuel prices. Short answer: NO! It's a fair question though, so here's what you need to know.
New Zealand's petrol excise tax is a fixed number of cents per litre, not a percentage of the pump price, so the tax take does not increase when fuel prices go up.
 
GST revenue on fuel theoretically rises when pump prices increase, but I'm advised that in the context of current price increases, this is expected to be offset by reduced fuel demand and by lower discretionary retail spending elsewhere as households adjust their budgets. Put another way, as Minister of Finance, I've not been told to expect an increase in the GST-take as a result of the fuel-price spike. 
 
I know this is something many people have asked in good faith, so I'm disappointed to see Chris Hipkins making factually inaccurate claims in response. It's simply misleading for him to allege that the global oil-price shock will somehow benefit the Government at the expense of everyday Kiwis. The simple reality is that petrol price increases will not benefit the Government financially - in fact the opposite is more likely to be the case.

The statement is constructed to suggest that Treasury has assured Willis that higher pump prices will not materially enrich the Crown, because New Zealanders will simply buy less petrol and spend less on everything else. It is, on close examination, a misleading conflation of two quite separate things: the trajectory of GST specifically, and the trajectory of total Crown revenue.

Let us deal with the first claim, that reduced fuel demand will offset the GST gain. This argument rests on the assumption that demand for fuel is highly elastic, that is, when prices rise sharply, people simply stop buying.

The evidence from New Zealand's own context tells a rather different story. Research published by the Motu Institute places the price elasticity of petrol demand in this country somewhere between negative 0.1 and negative 0.66, with short-run estimates at the lower end of that range. At a mid-point estimate of around negative 0.4, a 27 percent price increase would reduce consumption by approximately eleven percent. The GST take on the remaining 89 percent of purchased fuel has still risen by 27 percent. You do not need a Treasury economist to recognise that the arithmetic does not support a cancellation effect.

The second claim, that reduced discretionary spending elsewhere will neutralise the gain, is even weaker. The spending substitution Willis describes is not a disappearance of economic activity; it is a reallocation of it. A household that spends less at a restaurant in order to fill the tank has not removed that money from the GST-liable economy. It has moved it from one GST-bearing transaction to another. Fifteen percent of one hundred dollars spent on petrol raises precisely the same GST as fifteen percent of one hundred dollars spent at a cafe. The total take is, in this respect, broadly unaffected.

What Willis has carefully avoided discussing is perhaps the most consequential dynamic of all: the savings draw-down effect. 

New Zealand's household saving rate was already negative as recently as early 2025, and with wages stagnant in real terms, many families will not simply cut discretionary spending to absorb a $25 to $35 weekly increase in fuel costs. They will reach into whatever savings they have.

That money was previously sitting in a bank account, entirely outside the GST system, generating no consumption tax for the Crown whatsoever. Once it is withdrawn and spent on essentials, 13 cents in every dollar flows to Inland Revenue as GST. Far from reducing the Government's GST take, this dynamic actively increases it. The struggling family dipping into its savings to keep the car on the road is, in effect, funding a portion of its own relief package.

Independent analysis from Infometrics suggests the Crown could receive somewhere in the vicinity of $180 million in additional GST revenue from higher fuel prices over a hundred-day crisis period. Factor in savings drawdown, and the realistic upper bound reaches well beyond $300 million for 100 days, a figure not far removed from the estimate put forward by Opposition Leader Chris Hipkins, whom Willis incorrectly dismissed due to her own disinformation.

On Tuesday, The NZ Herald reported:

 

Fuel crisis: Nicola Willis slams Chris Hipkins’ ‘factually unbased claims’ over Govt’s tax take 

“Put it this way, as Minister of Finance, I’ve certainly not been advised that I’ll be getting windfall tax gains out of the current global crisis, in fact, I’ve been told to brace myself for the opposite, which is that this is likely to reduce Government revenue.”

Willis said she had been “disappointed” by Hipkins’ “factually unbased claims”.

“I think it’s really disappointing to see the leader of the Opposition grabbing what is a fair question but then providing Kiwis with misleading information. This is a time for cool, calm heads.”

 

Treasury's concern about total Crown revenue declining is almost certainly genuine and well-founded. A lack of any government growth strategy and a sustained fuel shock will compress corporate profits, slow economic activity, reduce PAYE receipts, and, if the Reserve Bank is forced to respond to inflation exceeding four percent, tighten financial conditions at exactly the wrong moment. These are serious risks to New Zealands fiscal outlook and Willis should be taking them seriously.

However, what the Finance Minister isn't entitled to do is apply a broad macroeconomic revenue warning specifically to GST in order to deflect from a perfectly reasonable question about whether the Government is quietly pocketing a windfall while ordinary New Zealanders struggle at the pump. Treasury would not have advised her that GST revenue is going to fall, because the evidence strongly suggests the opposite. Any economist who advised this should be sacked!

The Minister would do well to be straight about the distinction, rather than allowing the public to draw an inference that her own officials almost certainly did not intend.

The Coalition of Chaos Is Sinking New Zealand

There's a particular kind of arrogance that afflicts those who ascend to positions of power for which they are manifestly ill-prepared. It is not the arrogance of competence, of someone who has mastered their brief and knows it, but rather the breezy confidence of those who have never been seriously tested, and who mistake the trappings of office for the substance of competent governance.

It is precisely this brand of arrogance that has come to define the National-led Coalition of Chaos, and New Zealanders are now paying a very heavy price for it.

Let us begin with the Minister of Finance. Nicola Willis holds a degree in English literature and a postgraduate diploma in journalism, credentials that would serve her admirably as a book reviewer or a parliamentary press gallery correspondent, but which represent a curious qualification for the stewardship of a $400 billion economy.

One might charitably observe that some of New Zealand's more capable Finance Ministers have also lacked formal economics training. The difference, however, is one of disposition. Where her predecessors such as Bill English  listened to advisers, Willis has demonstrated a troubling tendency to do precisely the opposite.

When fifteen or more of the country's leading economists wrote open letters warning that her austerity programme would deepen and prolong the recession: that you cannot, as the PSA put it with admirable clarity, cut your way to prosperity. Willis's response was, in essence, to disagree and move on. The $43 billion in spending cuts she regards as a badge of honour are, in the view of those who actually study these things, a principal reason why New Zealand's economic recovery has been so anaemic, so halting, and so persistently disappointing.

The consequences of this ideological stubbornness are now documented not merely in the arguments of domestic critics, but in the assessments of global financial institutions. Fitch, the international credit ratings agency, has placed New Zealand's AA+ rating on negative outlook, warning that debt reduction is becoming "more difficult to envisage" as fiscal consolidation has been repeatedly delayed.

General government gross debt is now forecast to rise to 56% of GDP by June 2027, a figure that sits grotesquely above the 36.1% projection made when New Zealand was last upgraded in September 2022. That the delays have occurred across successive governments does not absolve the current administration; it indicts it, for it was handed a roadmap of warnings and chose to ignore them.

Meanwhile, Reuters has laid bare the structural fragility that underlies the government's cheerful forecasts. For decades, New Zealand has relied upon a rising housing market to engineer economic recoveries. That playbook has now failed.

On Monday, Reuters reported:

New Zealand struggles to regain economic mojo without housing recovery

At the same time, economic growth cooled in the fourth quarter, data showed last week, with construction slumping and consumer spending weak, even before the massive distruptions created by the ​war. The unemployment rate stands at a decade-high of 5.4%.

...

Government efforts to stoke growth have been lacklustre, even with an election looming on November 7 that is sure to be dominated by ​voter dissatisfaction over the economy. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has offered little aimed at reviving the labour market, which is still reeling from waves of public sector layoffs last year.

Even after the Reserve Bank slashed the Official Cash Rate from 5.5% to 2.25%, house prices remain some 20% below their pandemic peak, hollowing out the wealth effect upon which so many households depended. Borrowers are being squeezed, construction projects lie stalled, and a wave of New Zealanders, precisely the professionals and entrepreneurs a genuine growth strategy would seek to retain, have lost hope and are quietly departing for better opportunities in Australia.

Into this fraught domestic picture now falls the additional chaos of Donald Trump's war in the Middle East. Oil price inflation is pushing up borrowing costs globally, potentially forcing the Reserve Bank into a more hawkish stance at precisely the moment the economy can least afford it. New Zealand's substantial dependence on energy imports makes it acutely vulnerable.

Christopher Luxon, a former airline chief executive who has consistently demonstrated that managing a corporate balance sheet is rather different from governing a sovereign nation, appears to have no coherent response to this gathering storm beyond the ritual recitation of talking points about fiscal responsibility, the same fiscal responsibility, one might note, that Fitch has just formally called into question. It's that kind of incompetence that New Zealanders are starting to notice en masse.

Yesterday, The Guardian reported:

New Zealand PM’s ratings dip as fragile economy fails to impress before November election, poll shows

National leader Christopher Luxon drops in preferred PM stakes with rise in people saying country heading in wrong direction

The RNZ-Reid Research poll, released on Monday, also found a growing number of people felt that New Zealand was heading in the wrong direction.

Luxon slid two points to 17.3% in the preferred prime minister stakes – his lowest result across major polls since he became leader in 2023. Labour’s Chris Hipkins also dipped 0.4 points, to 20.7%.

The prime minister’s net favourability – the difference between those who rate his performance as good versus poor – has also dropped from -14 in January to -20.6, his weakest result in the Reid Research series since he became National’s leader in 2021.

Meanwhile, Luxon’s National party has slipped nearly five points behind the main opposition party, Labour. If an election were held today, the parliamentary left and rights blocs would face a hung parliament.

The cruellest irony of this government's tenure is that its most zealous cuts have fallen upon the very investments in science, in public services, in wages, and in housing infrastructure, that might have produced the growth it so loudly claims to want.

While minimum wage workers have absorbed a third consecutive real-terms pay cut, and while $12 billion was stripped from pay equity settlements affecting predominantly female workers, landlords have had their interest deductibility restored and tobacco companies have breathed a sigh of relief to the tune of $3.2 billion dollars.

New Zealand deserves better than a Finance Minister with an English literature degree who dismisses the warnings of fifteen economists, led by a Prime Minister who cannot read a room and remains fluent only in corporate double-speak. Reuters did not mince words: Luxon has offered little aimed at reviving a labour market still reeling from the waves of public sector layoffs his own government inflicted. The Coalition of Chaos has not merely failed to provide a growth strategy. It has actively dismantled the conditions under which one might have been possible.

Trump's War Machine Is Picking Your Pocket

Trump Cheerleader - Greg Swenson

There's a particular kind of audacity required to sit before a global television audience, as the bombs are still falling and the Strait of Hormuz chokes on geopolitical recklessness, and declare that the American economy has never been in better shape.

That audacity belongs to Greg Swenson, founding partner of London-based merchant bank Brigg Macadam, Chairman of Republicans Overseas UK, and reliably one of the most polished purveyors of pro-Trump economic cheerleading available to international broadcasters.

Appearing on Al Jazeera's Counting the Cost, Swenson offered the full bouquet of administration talking points: GDP is growing, jobs are being created, America is a net oil exporter, and therefore the economic consequences of this catastrophic, unprovoked war of aggression against Iran are, essentially, nothing to worry about. Each of these claims deserves scrutiny, because each of them, on examination, is either wrong, misleading, or a deliberate half-truth designed to paper over a steadily worsening reality.

On 18 March, Al Jazeera reported:

Could the Iran war trigger a global recession?

Energy prices are surging as the Iran war disrupts supply, raising risks for the US, China and Europe.

All eyes are on the Strait of Hormuz.

The longer it remains closed, the greater the damage to the global economy.

Iran continues to block tankers from shipping close to 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.

That is roughly twice the disruption the world suffered during the energy shock of the 1970s.

Big oil shocks have historically led to considerable economic turmoil, high inflation, stagnation and recession.

Oil and gas prices are already surging, and economies are expected to slow.

On GDP, Swenson was almost certainly citing the Q3 2025's headline-grabbing 4.4% annualised growth figure, conveniently neglecting to mention that Q4 2025 came in at a feeble 0.7%, the weakest quarter in over a year. That weakness was partly a consequence of the administration's own government shutdown, which the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates subtracted a full percentage point from growth. Full-year 2025 GDP expansion of 2.1% represents a decline from 2.8% in 2024. This is not a story of economic momentum. It is a story of deceleration dressed up as dynamism.

On jobs, the situation is, frankly, scandalous. The Bureau of Labor Statistics initially reported 584,000 jobs added across 2025, already a modest figure. After receiving complete state-level data, that number was revised down to just 181,000 for the entire year. That is the weakest non-recessionary performance since 2003. It represents a collapse from 1.46 million jobs in 2024, and it sits alongside the second-largest negative payroll revision on record.

Federal employment alone has shed 327,000 positions since January 2025, largely due to the administration's own mass redundancy programme. Economists have taken to calling this a "jobless expansion." When a banker on television tells you more jobs are being created, you might reasonably ask: compared to what?

The net oil exporter claim is perhaps the most cynically constructed of the three. PolitiFact rates this assertion "Half True": the US exports more petroleum products than it imports in aggregate, but it remains a net importer of crude oil, taking in 6.2 million barrels a day whilst exporting barely 4 million.

The refinery mismatch, namely US infrastructure built over decades to process heavier Middle Eastern crude, means that regardless of domestic production volumes, American consumers are paying at the pump for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices have already risen by nearly a dollar per gallon, reaching a national average of $3.88. Only 27% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of fuel costs. The "net exporter" talking point isn't an economic argument. It is a confidence trick.

Swenson is not alone in this enterprise. Senator Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News to describe Trump's illegal war as "a good investment," adding that once "this regime goes down, we're gonna make a ton of money." This is the authentic voice of American imperial economics: war as commercial opportunity, body counts as market conditions. It should chill any observer with a functioning moral compass.

And then there is the profiteering. Verified reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Responsible Statecraft confirms that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are actively investing in Powerus, a Florida drone company positioned to capitalise on the Pentagon's sudden, urgent demand for drone technology, demand created directly by their father's war. In 2025, Trump Jr.-backed companies received hundreds of millions in Defence Department contracts.

On March 10, The New Republic reported:

Trump Sons Back New Drone Company Amid Iran War

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have found another avenue to make money off their father’s presidency.

President Trump’s sons are trying to sell drones to the Pentagon.

 ...

Powerus wants to build more than 10,000 drones a month. 

The Trump-backed investment firm American Ventures, the Trump-backed investment bank Dominari Securities, and drone parts maker Unusual Machines, the latter of which Trump Jr. is a shareholder and advisory board member of, are involved in the public merger. Eric Trump is also invested in Israeli drone maker Xtend. 

Jared Kushner's private equity firm Affinity Partners, meanwhile, receives $25 million annually from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the same Saudi government that, according to the Washington Post, actively lobbied Trump to attack Iran. The conflicts of interest are not subtle. They are structural.

The media's role in all of this deserves its own reckoning. Coverage of the Strait of Hormuz closure in much of the Western press has been framed primarily as an Iranian aggression problem, a crisis to be managed, rather than the foreseeable and widely forecast consequence of an unprovoked military attack launched without congressional authorisation, without an imminent threat to the United States, and without a coherent post-conflict plan.

Multiple Pentagon officials have confirmed to CNN that the administration underestimated Iran's willingness to close the strait. Pete Hegseth's response was not to acknowledge that failure. It was to berate journalists for reporting it, and to speculate openly about the day CNN would fall under the editorial control of a Trump family ally.

On March 14, Rueters reported:

 

Pentagon chief says he's eager for Trump ally to buy CNN as he blasts war coverage

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth on Friday said he was ​eager to see Trump ally and Paramount Skydance, CEO David Ellison, take over CNN, as he criticized ‌the U.S. news media's coverage of the Iran war.

"The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better," said Hegseth, a former Fox News show host and combat veteran, referring to Paramount's $110 billion deal to acquire CNN-parent Warner Bros.

This determination to suppress inconvenient truth rather than confront it runs as a thread through everything the administration does. Whether it is doctoring economic statistics, dismissing independent analysis, silencing military advisors who question the war's strategic logic, or threatening the institutional independence of broadcasters who report accurately on its consequences, the Trump administration has demonstrated a consistent and deliberate commitment to managing perception over managing reality.

The American public is being asked to trust an administration that punishes honesty, rewards loyalty over competence, and has measurable financial interests in prolonging a conflict it launched without legal authority, without a credible threat to justify it, and without the faintest outline of an exit strategy. That the bombs keep falling while the approval numbers keep sliding appears, to those in the White House, to be just a communications problem.

Then there's the sanctions debacle. Three weeks into the conflict, the Treasury Department quietly lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian crude oil at sea, freeing it for purchase by American allies. The United States is now actively generating revenue for the government it is simultaneously bombing. Senator Richard Blumenthal called it "sickeningly, shamefully stupid," and critics across the political spectrum have noted that Trump spent years denouncing Obama for returning $1.7 billion of Iran's frozen funds, and is now handing Tehran up to ten times that amount.

This isn't a strategy. It is the behaviour of an administration stumbling through a war it had no plan to win, launched at least in part to drown out a far more uncomfortable story: the partially released Epstein files, from which the DOJ illegally withheld documents directly implicating Trump in abuse allegations, and which vanished almost entirely from news reports and public discourse the moment the first bombs started to fall.

Trump's overall approval rating tells its own story, though the picture is more nuanced than a single number suggests. Depending on the pollster, his approval sits somewhere between 35% and 42%, with the most comprehensive rolling tracker, Civiqs, recording 39% approval against 57% disapproval across nearly 93,000 registered voters surveyed through to March 19, 2026. Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin aggregator puts his net approval at -15.3, a new second-term low, and three points worse than at the same stage of his first term. The Economist/YouGov survey has 56% of Americans strongly disapproving. Just 27% approve of his handling of fuel costs.

Internationally, the picture is bleaker still. Gallup's survey across 135 countries puts median approval of US leadership at just 33%. Pew Research, polling across 24 nations, found that 62% of people worldwide lack confidence in Trump, with his ratings trailing Joe Biden's by an average of twelve percentage points across those same countries. In Germany, confidence in Trump sits at just 12%. In Mexico, a mere 6%. The man who promised to make America great again has made it, by most global measures, less trusted, less liked, and less respected than it was under the predecessor he never stops attacking. He dismisses all of it: "I don't care about polling. I have to do the right thing."

The "right thing," it seems, has already cost Americans more than $11.3 billion in the first six days, with the conflict now burning through over a billion dollars a day. The Pentagon has subsequently requested a further $200 billion in supplemental funding from Congress, a sum four times larger than originally signalled. When asked to justify the figure, Hegseth's response was, "Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys." He added that the number might increase, oblivious to the reality that all the United States is currently doing is killing civilians and the world's economy.

At the current rate of spending, that $200 billion would fund the war for just another 100 to 200 days. To put that in perspective, the entire annual US investment in global health, which funds HIV treatment for 25 million people and has saved an estimated 65 million lives since 2002, amounts to $12.4 billion, meaning the $200 billion war chest equals roughly 16 years of US global health spending, all to be consumed in under a year. News agencies are conspicuously silent about what this all means for the United States' already unmanageable $39 trillion of government debt. Meanwhile, tariffs have raised the average American household's costs by $1,500, pushed inflation well above where it would otherwise sit, and handed the Trump family's investment portfolio a timely and lucrative shot in the arm.

Greg Swenson sat before a global audience and called this a success story. It is not. It is a protection racket, and the American public is the one being protected from the truth.

Rocket Lab Fuelled by Broken Promises

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that is dressed up in the language of innovation and national pride. It does not arrive as an outright lie. It arrives as a vision, a story, a community hui at the local marae, a selfie with the Wairoa Lions Club. It arrives as a promise. And then, quietly, expensively, and with considerable personal enrichment, it is broken.

That is the story of Rocket Lab, "Sir" Peter Beck, and the people of Mahia Peninsula.

When Rocket Lab first arrived on the East Coast of the North Island and sought the consent of local Iwi and hapu to launch rockets from their whenua, Beck was unambiguous about what his company would and would not do.

In an early interview, he stated plainly: "Certainly if it involves something that's going to harm people then we're not really interested at all... certainly we don't want to be involved with any kind of missile programmes or anything to do with armaments."

 He added, simply: "No. No weapons."

Sonya Smith of Ngati Rakaipaaka hapu, whose people were among those assured of Rocket Lab's peaceful intentions, has been equally plain about how that promise has played out. "We were sold a bit of a story," she told RNZ. "It talked about satellite launches that supported environmental outcomes and safety outcomes and that's not really how it's played out."

Billboards went up around Mahia: "No military payloads. Haere Atu, Rocket Lab." The company did not respond when RNZ asked whether it had broken its promise to the community. That silence speaks volumes.

It should now be abundantly clear to any New Zealander paying attention that Peter Beck looked concerned Maori in the eye and told them what they needed to hear. A third of all payloads launched by Rocket Lab have since been for the United States military or affiliated agencies. The company now holds over US$1.3 billion in contracts with the US Space Development Agency alone, building missile tracking satellites explicitly designed, in the Pentagon's own words, to "significantly increase the coverage and accuracy needed to close kill chains."

Kill chains. That is the clinical euphemism the American military uses for finding people and killing them.

Which brings us to the present moment. The United States and Israel are conducting military operations against Iran. One of those attacks involved a US strike which destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province, killing between 175 and 180 people, most of them children. Investigations by The New York Times, BBC Verify, and the NPR and CBC concluded the United States was most likely responsible. Amnesty International has called for accountability. The United States has offered none.

 

Last week, The Guardian reported:

 

US responsible for deadly missile strike on Iran school, preliminary inquiry says

Strike that killed at least 175 people, most of them children, reportedly due to targeting mistake by US military planners

A preliminary US military investigation has reportedly determined that Washington was responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school in February that killed scores of children.

According to the New York Times, quoting unnamed US officials and others familiar with the initial findings, the investigation has concluded that the strike on 28 February on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was the result of a targeting mistake by the US military planners.

Iranian officials had put put death toll from the attack as at least 175 people, the majority of them children, in one of the worst and most shocking American strikes producing civilian fatalities in recent memory. 

 

Rocket Lab is building the targeting and communications architecture of the same military that just bombed a school full of young girls.

When asked directly whether any payloads it had launched were being used in the Iran conflict, Rocket Lab's Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Morgan Connaughton, said responsibility for how satellites are used rests with the satellite owner. This is the statement of a corporation that has laundered its conscience.

New Zealand has no strategic interest in this illegal war. The United States and Israel have struck Iranian oil and gas infrastructure, strikes that will send petrol prices upward here at home, that threaten regional stability, and that put this country in an invidious position as a close intelligence partner of the United States through the Five Eyes arrangement. The United States and Israel's unlawful attacks are putting New Zealanders and our offshore investments at risk.

Rocket Lab's deep integration with the American military-industrial complex isn't a matter of abstract ethics. It is a concrete conflict of interest for this country's foreign policy and our standing in the Pacific.

Peter Beck cannot be trusted. He told Maori communities one thing and did the exact opposite. He built a company on a promise of peaceful science and turned it into a weapons contractor that helps rogue states indiscriminately target innocent civilians. He accepted a knighthood and a Nasdaq listing while the infrastructure he is building helps guide the most powerful military on earth, the same military that bombed a primary school, murdering hundreds of school girls.

The people of Māhia Peninsula deserved better. New Zealand deserves better. And the schoolchildren of Minab deserved to grow up.

The Dumbest War in Living Memory

There are wars fought for survival. There are wars fought for resources. There are wars fought, however misguidedly, for ideology. And then there is Donald Trump's illegal war against Iran, a war so bereft of coherent justification, so naked in its opportunism, and so catastrophic in its execution that future historians will struggle to find a category in which to place it. The dumbest war in living memory has found its author, and he is currently sitting in the most powerful position, explaining that he knows nothing about a bombed school or a destroyed desalination plant, and that Iranians are in any case, according to him, "among the most evil people ever on earth."

Let us dispense, first, with the pretexts.

This is not a war for security. The Arms Control Association has noted plainly that such a war of choice against Iran, without congressional approval, violates the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act, as well as Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations. Iran was, by all credible accounts, still engaged in diplomatic talks on the very day the US and Israel missiles began to fall on civilian targets.

IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said on 2 March 2026 that the agency had found no evidence of "a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons" in Iran, and when asked directly whether Iran was "days or weeks away from building a bomb," his response was simply "no." Iran was still engaging in reportedly productive diplomatic talks over its nuclear program the day before the United States unleashed its weaponry. Security was never the point. If it were, you do not blow up the table at which the other party is prepared to sit.

This is not a war for oil, at least not in the way that cynics once imagined. American and Israeli strikes have, for the first time, targeted oil storage and refining facilities in Tehran. You do not secure a resource by incinerating it. What you do achieve, however, is a surge in global oil prices that enriches investors (including Trumps family members) and producers elsewhere, rattles markets, and inflicts immediate pain upon ordinary consumers, including New Zealanders whose import-dependent economy has absolutely no insulation from such shocks.

This is not a war to free the Iranian people either. The liberation narrative has long served as the humanitarian mask of American imperialism, and it fits no better here than it did in Iraq. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that the United States attacked a freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island, with water supply to thirty villages impacted. You do not liberate a population by destroying the infrastructure upon which their survival depends. The Geneva Conventions are unambiguous: targeting facilities indispensable to civilian survival constitutes a war crime.

When Trump was asked about the desalination plant, he offered this remarkably incoherent response: "I know nothing about a desalinisation plant, other than to say, if they're complaining about..." He then trailed off into fresh denunciations of October 7, conflating Iran and Hamas as though the distinction were a bureaucratic inconvenience rather than a basic fact.

Bombing schoolchildren does not liberate them. Bombing desalination plants does not free people. It starves them, and it breeds a generation for whom the word "America" will forever cause resentment and anger across the entire world.

What this war actually is becomes clearer the more one examines the timeline. Whenever new material surfaces connecting Trump to the Epstein files, fresh documents, flight logs, or witness testimony implicating powerful men in the sexual abuse and torture of children, the news cycle conveniently fills with explosions. The pattern has become so reliable that it scarcely requires elaboration. A political war, then, fought as distraction. A racist and religious war, in which an entire nation of 90 million people is reduced by its attackers to a single, dehumanised caricature.

Trump has described Iranians as among "the most evil people ever on earth," a statement of breathtaking historical ignorance and moral vacancy from a man who has spent years cultivating relationships with some of the most genuinely evil figures of modern times.

From the moment Operation Epic Fury was launched, Trump's messaging has oscillated between outright fabrication, dealmaking and the wholesale destruction of Iran. He has called on the IRGC to surrender in exchange for immunity. He has asked Iranian diplomats to switch sides. He has declared that the new Supreme Leader will "not last long" without American approval. These are not the utterances of a statesman prosecuting a considered strategy. They are the improvisations of a man who began a war without a plan to end it, and who is now making his endgame up as the west loses allies and the body count climbs.

OMG a reporter confronts Donald Trump about Iran bombed its own elementary school with an American Tomahawk missile ridiciliously 😂🤣😭 pic.twitter.com/k7ld66Xk9W

— Furkan Gözükara (@FurkanGozukara) March 9, 2026

The war is not supported by the American people, and the Trump administration has done and said little to justify its belligerent actions. The varying and contradictory rationales from Trump's useful idiots have only offered the public simple incoherent jargon, and run contrary to available evidence.

New Zealand cannot afford to observe this catastrophe with the polite detachment of a small nation that prefers not to make a fuss. The economic consequences of a destabilised Middle East, surging oil prices, disrupted shipping lanes, and rattled global markets, land here with the same weight as anywhere. But beyond the economic, there is a moral obligation that this country has historically been willing to honour. We have a tradition of independent foreign policy that this moment demands we exercise again. But sadly our current spineless leadership is so vacuous as to appear like they're in support of Trump and Netanyahu's illegal war of annihilation.

Every missile that falls on a school, every village left without clean water, every use of illegal weapons, every civilian death that Trump waves away with a fresh denunciation of people he knows nothing about, each of these is a brick in the wall of resentment that will define how the world regards complicit Western nations for decades to come. History is not made only by those who pull triggers. It is also made by those who stay silent while the triggers are being pulled.

This is the dumbest kind of war: illegal, unjustified, racist, politically motivated, and conducted by a man who cannot name the school or desalination plant he has just ordered destroyed. New Zealand should oppose this war. Our politicians should say so, clearly and without any apology.