Terence O’Brien had the rare and no doubt undesired distinction of rising to one of the most exalted positions in New Zealand diplomacy, then being unceremoniously recalled to Wellington without explanation just when his career was at its zenith. What is perhaps more surprising is that he appears to have gone to his grave not knowing why he was kneecapped.
O’Brien died in December 2022, aged 86. In his memoir Consolations of Insignificance, to be published on May 9, he outlines the circumstances in which he was unexpectedly relieved in 1993 of his posting as New Zealand’s ambassador to the United Nations. O’Brien drops a hint that he was shafted by a colleague in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but with true diplomatic discretion he doesn’t say who.
Neither does he profess to know why, although it’s possible, reading between the lines, to draw some tentative conclusions. O’Brien emerges from the book’s pages as an idealist and a champion of New Zealand’s independent stance in international affairs. At a time when the diplomatic relationship with traditional friends and allies (read Britain, Australia and the US) was still strained by New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy, he was sometimes at odds with colleagues who remained wedded to allegiances dictated largely by defence and security concerns.
Privately, O’Brien strongly supported New Zealand’s right to forge its own path in foreign policy. I know this because he once contacted me to applaud an editorial I had written deploring American bullying over the Anzus Treaty. But his wasn’t a stance that would have endeared him to everyone at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to wonder whether he fell out of favour because it was felt he couldn’t be relied on to toe the establishment line.
What must have particularly aggrieved O’Brien was that he was relieved of his New York posting after successfully leading New Zealand’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council. A previous attempt, in 1980, had resulted in an ignominious defeat when African countries voted en masse against New Zealand in protest against its sporting links with apartheid-era South Africa. But this time, against counter-bids from Spain and Sweden, O’Brien successfully piloted New Zealand’s bid through the labyrinthine complexities of UN politics. This was achieved by an Olympian feat of lobbying over a period of 18 months during which O’Brien calculated he had more than 400 one-on-one meetings with ministers, ambassadors and other functionaries. Significantly, New Zealand was not supported by its traditional “friends”, instead relying on the backing of Third World countries sympathetic to its non-nuclear stance.
At no point does O’Brien explain why New Zealand’s membership of the Security Council was so important, or indeed what it achieved. A sceptic could be excused for suspecting that diplomats are often caught up in their own universe, with its rituals, gestures and coded language, while the rest of the world moves on around them.
Membership of the Security Council brought with it the influence and prestige of serving briefly as council president, a position rotated among council members, but any elation O’Brien might have felt at his elevation would have been tempered by the knowledge he wouldn’t be sticking around for long. Breaking with precedent, the ministry told him he was to be replaced well before the expiration of the normal four-year term. O’Brien recalls that this information was verbally conveyed to him by an unnamed colleague at an airport as boarding calls for the colleague’s departure were sounding – on the face of it, an astonishingly cavalier and cowardly way to tell a top-ranking diplomat he was getting the heave-ho. (O’Brien subsequently founded the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University, where he ended his career in 2001.)
His sacking – for that’s effectively what it was – remains officially unexplained. Inevitably, it sparked rumour and speculation in Wellington and even attracted the attention of the British satirical magazine Private Eye, which ran a piece suggesting O’Brien had been recalled at the request of the UK government. O’Brien contacted the journalist responsible to suggest he had the wrong end of the stick, only to learn the hack had access to information that O’Brien wasn’t aware of. Frustratingly, this tantalising angle isn’t developed any further.
Was it simply because the tide had turned politically that O’Brien fell out of favour? Observers could have been excused for thinking so, since the Labour government that appointed him to the UN had been voted out of office in 1990 and replaced by National under Jim Bolger. But O’Brien reveals that Bolger eased the pain of his dislocation by arranging for him to extend his New York posting by six months – not the action of a prime minister who wanted him gone by lunchtime. And if there was any hint of bad blood between O’Brien and the former National leader, it will surely be dispelled by the latter’s contribution of a complimentary foreword to O’Brien’s book.
Intriguingly, all this played out against a backdrop of conflict within the National Party over nuclear policy. National’s announcement in 1990 that it would adopt Labour’s policy of barring nuclear warship visits caused Don McKinnon to resign in protest as the party’s foreign affairs spokesman. O’Brien points out the “not so gentle irony” that only months later, McKinnon became Foreign Affairs Minister and nominally took charge of New Zealand’s bid for membership of the Security Council, in which international support for the non-nuclear stance was to be a key factor.
O’Brien’s successor at the UN was the relatively unknown Colin Keating, who proceeded to distinguish himself by exposing the unfolding genocide in Rwanda at a time when other member countries, tired of involvement in embarrassingly messy and costly peacekeeping exercises, were determined to look the other way. But while O’Brien was obviously wounded at being replaced by someone he viewed as lacking his carefully cultivated connections and long diplomatic track record, there’s no suggestion in the book that the much younger Keating was involved in a plot against him.
Forty years on, the UN saga is the meatiest part of a memoir that must surely be a runaway contender for Clunkiest Title of the Year. It’s not till page 166 in a 169-page book that the reader discovers what Consolations of Insignificance alludes to, and even then the phrase doesn’t exactly burn itself into the consciousness. It turns out to be a reference to O’Brien’s observation that New Zealand benefits diplomatically from being a small country that threatens no one.
Combine that enigmatic title with a selection of photographs apparently chosen on the basis of their extraordinary dullness, mostly being pictures of the author in a variety of drearily formal diplomatic settings, and it’s hard to escape the impression that the publisher perversely set out to ensure the book would languish unnoticed even in the academically inclined outlets for which it’s presumably destined. It deserves better, since O’Brien’s career spanned an eventful period when the country was forging a new relationship with the outside world – a relationship no longer underpinned by unswerving deference to its traditional allies.
He was involved in the establishment of New Zealand’s first embassy in Beijing and served as the official note-taker at the prolonged and tortuous negotiations that achieved some measure of protection for New Zealand farm exports when Britain joined what was then the European Economic Community (now the EU).
He recalls of those negotiations, arguably New Zealand’s most concerted diplomatic offensive ever, that New Zealand’s low-key diplomacy was more effective than Australia’s tough, combative stance – a point he again makes later in different contexts. O’Brien pays tribute to the then-deputy prime minister Jack Marshall, whose efforts on behalf of his country were “prodigious”. He writes that New Zealand was able quietly to leverage its relationship with Europe as a “small, unthreatening Western democracy with shared culture, values, ties of kith and kin and a record of battlefield sacrifice on European soil”. It was, he says, a demonstration of the “soft power” that New Zealand diplomats were able to wield repeatedly in world forums. Wining and dining played its part too – a recurring theme.
O’Brien was pitched into an entirely different political and diplomatic environment when he was posted to the Cook Islands as New Zealand High Commissioner in 1975. There he found a recently (and reluctantly) independent country where “elegant” constitutional frameworks designed in Wellington butted up against the reality of a culture that was stubbornly resistant to Westminster norms and ideals of economic self-reliance. Boozy diplomatic receptions were the only occasions when rival factions mingled, and on at least one occasion they ended in a fist fight. O’Brien seems unable to decide whether to be appalled or amused by the way politics played out in the Cooks under the “capricious” Sir Albert Henry, whose knighthood was later revoked. (For a more thorough exposition of the vagaries of South Pacific politics, this writer recommends veteran Pacific correspondent Mike Field’s entertaining book Swimming with Sharks – if you can find a copy.)
Later in his career, O’Brien would find himself caught up in the 1987 Fiji coup and the hideous civil war in Bosnia, where he took part in a “harrowing” mission while serving on the Security Council. He reflects that the UN, having been established to prevent wars between countries, now found itself having to deal with the entirely different challenge of resolving conflict within national borders – as in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Somalia and Cambodia.
The reader may long for O’Brien to dish the dirt, but the indiscretions are rare and invariably mild. We learn, for example, that he took a dim view of “celebrity” trade negotiators who revelled in the media spotlight while the professional diplomats got on with the hard graft behind the scenes. (He doesn’t accuse anyone directly, but you don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to see that O’Brien had the late Mike Moore in his sights.) And it will surprise no one to learn that Robert Muldoon’s pugnaciousness was a diplomatic obstruction, or that David Lange wasn’t much interested in meat and butter exports and used his wit to avoid engaging with serious issues. Overall, O’Brien’s book tends to confirm the impression that in the eyes of career diplomats, elected politicians often just get in the way.
Now and again a heartfelt emotion penetrates the dry, bloodless diplomat-speak that permeates much of his book. In one instance O’Brien reminds us, with obvious disgust, that none of New Zealand’s supposed “friends” – least of all Margaret Thatcher’s Britain – lodged a protest against the French over the outrageous Rainbow Warrior bombing, in which O’Brien was involved in settlement negotiations. Elsewhere, he rails against the “deplorably inhumane” consequences of economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s and smoulders with resentment at the condescension displayed by British diplomats who always knew what was best for their colonial offspring. But he doesn’t let his own country entirely off the hook, noting the contradiction that New Zealand in the era before deregulation was constantly lobbying for market access while simultaneously maintaining a tightly controlled imports regime
O’Brien also reveals a distaste, though no more than that, for the neoliberalism that transformed New Zealand in the 1980s and 90s. On such occasions O’Brien’s personal morality (he was a Catholic, though he makes no mention of his faith) pushes its way to the surface. He observes that “New Zealand representatives overseas are often required to advance or defend government policies about which they might retain personal and private doubts”. One wonders whether his harbouring of such doubts may ultimately have counted against him.
Consolations of Insignificance by Terence O’Brien (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $40) is available from bookstores nationwide.
