China’s recent launch of a nuclear-capable missile into the Pacific was greeted with howls of protest from the US and its allies. "We are living in a region that is proudly nuclear free. We don't want to see increasing militarisation in our region," New Zealand PM Christopher Luxon said. It came on the heels of his Defence minister suggesting a national conversation was needed about nuclear propulsion because Australia is committed to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact. 

As a dress rehearsal for the coming war on China, RIMPAC is a big deal. This year's event is billed as bringing together global naval forces to address ‘the current threat China is posing in the Indo-Pacific region’. Every two years the US Pacific Fleet/Indo-Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, hosts the Rim of the Pacific exercise, the world's largest international maritime exercise.  RIMPAC gathers the US and its allies together for a show of force and a building of interoperability, cementing relationships and ensuring countries like Australia and New Zealand are increasingly integrated into weapons procurement and US war plans so they can act as  “force multipliers” for the United States.

In this interview with Russian Federation Ambassador to Wellington Stanislav Krans we discussed the legality/illegality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the state of Russian-Western diplomacy, and the central role diplomats should play in bringing the war to an end. We also touched on what it is like to be a Russian diplomat in a Western country. 

By impugning the good name of some of our finest citizens Winston Peters betrays his duty to defend New Zealand and puts at risk Kiwis who continue their non-violent campaign to open a humanitarian corridor to the suffering people of Palestine.

There was only one moment when I was interviewing him last week that Mousa Taher broke down and cried. It was a surprising, pivotal moment in the interview. He had just made it back to New Zealand from Israeli detention. Of course, we covered the ordeal – the beatings, the death threats, the scare tactics with dogs, etc – that he and 430 other Global Sumud activists from 60 countries had been subjected to over four days from their interception in international waters to their release and flight to safety in Tűrkiye.