Winston Peters clings to a dying empire

China has more high speed trains than the rest of the world put together, the US has none.

Winston Peters' attack against Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan because of his Chinese heritage almost created a diplomatic furore. If it wasn't for the mature restraint from the Chinese to not react to the highly charged racist rhetoric from our Foreign Minister, it could have had an economic impact.

I think this is an opportunity to appreciate how the world order is changing and how our once strong connection to the US is becoming increasingly untenable.

Most of us have been brought up to feel that New Zealand is part of the 'developed world' (largely culturally western) and the rest of the world was full of the 'developing nations' that we felt a paternalistic need to support to eventually become as good as us. This feeling of cultural and economic superiority also has its roots the colonising culture many of our ancestors brought with them to NZ.

I think we need to have our complacency challenged by global realities. The British Empire ended soon after WW2 and the US Empire has been imploding since Japan, and then China, have steadily grown as trading nations and globally influential economies. India has also become a major global technology force.

Most of our perception of what is happening in the world is highly blinkered and narrowed to those countries where we feel a cultural affinity. In our MSM news the times we see or hear anything about those developing countries is when they experience some kind of disaster or are engulfed in a war. We see little about their economic growth.

The 'western world' economic alliance, or the OECD, is what we use for benchmarks of economic success or educational progress and yet the member countries only make up 17% of the world's population.

Many of those so called developing nations have been steadily developing under our noses, but largely unseen. Their major economies (including Brazil, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia and Russia) formed their own economic Alliance called BRICS. This alliance captures 54% of the global population, over 3x more than the OECD.

Currently BRICS produces 44% of global GDP and the OECD 46%. The OECD slight dominance will soon be lost.

The US was the dominant western/global power but is now a dying empire. China has already surpassed the US for purchasing power and is essentially the largest economy in the world. Only 1% of Chinese currently live in poverty, while it is 11.5% in the US.

The productive capacity of China's 1.4 billion people, with highly functioning infrastructure is massive. The US is experiencing growing poverty, failing infrastructure and an education system that is ranked only 31st in the world. Thanks to Trump the US has lost its global influence and it is making China look more like the diplomatic grownup.

Obviously China has its own democracy/human rights issues but the US is currently incarcerating people based on ethnicity at a much higher rate than China. When China has an imprisonment rate of 119 people per 100,000 and the US has 542 per 100,000, it does make one question the reality of individual freedoms in both countries.

We have a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with China and 25% ($23 Billion) our exports go there. We don't have a FTA with the US and it only takes 12% ($9 billion) of our exports. Trump recently introduced new tariffs against us.

Iran is a member of BRICS and is the 4th largest producer of oil in the world. Historically Western economies have wanted to capture that oil for themselves and in 1953 the CIA and British Intelligence orchestrated a coup which overthrew the elected Prime Minister to regain control of Iran's nationalised oil industry. The US and its western allies have been interfering in and disrupting Middle East politics for many decades for their own economic interests. The rise of radical Islamic Governments have only occurred in the Middle East because of Western interference.

Trump's ignorance in thinking that he could easily crush Iran and change the government, like he did in Venezuela, destroyed what little global credibility the US had. Nato abandoned him and over half the world see the US as the aggressor in just the same way as we see Russia as the aggressor against Ukraine. Trump cannot win a war against Iran because he isn't just fighting one country he is actually up against all of BRICS who definitely don't want IRAN's oil to go west and see the US attack as the unlawful act that it is.

So this brings me back to Winston Peters' ill judged attack on Lawrence Xu-Nan. Winston's political instincts come from an era that has been well and truly surpassed by a new reality. His party's embrace of the Trump's MAGA movement is actually aligning itself with the death throes of a dying empire. Our PM's initial reaction to the US war against Iran was one of total support.

New Zealand needs to have independent foreign policy and a wider diplomatic approach to how we engage with the world. The western world view is no longer dominant and with far-right populism spreading across Europe, claiming moral superiority is hard to defend.

Our future is best assured if we have more Lawrences in our government and ensure that NZ First quickly becomes a historic relic of our political past.

It is the quality of our global relationships that will best support our future security, not a $9 billion spend on our military and strengthening our alliance with the US.