The Yanks Aren't Coming

New Zealand at the end of the Pax Americana

Welcome new subscribers! My apologies—I’ve been posting every other week to meet my PhD deadlines. I’ll be back to weekly as a soon as I can.

NZ folks—I’m hosting the The Magic of Writing it Down, a journaling workshop at Mrs. Blackwell’s Village Bookshop, on March 20th in Greytown. Come join us!

To the letter—

The day Chinese warships fired guns in the Tasman Sea I met a robot on the beach. This was the other side of the country, the Pacific side, at a holiday park north of Christchurch. After dinner my son and I followed a footpath through the windbreak of pines out to a black gravel beach, where we found a large concrete culvert looming in the dusk. The culvert’s last brace stood alone in the tide, a freestanding wall taller than I am. The wall had two circular holes where the pipes must’ve run. The circles were totally eyes. The eyes of a giant robot buried in the sand.

My son agreed. We’ve had a run of moon-eyed metal guardians in our house of late—The Iron Giant, The Wild Robot. Concrete is far drabber stuff, a sour mud designed never to move. We watched the rising tide slosh through the holes like tears. Evening light drained from the eastern sky. The news reports said China was just doing a drill. But the robot knows. Wet concrete on the beach smells of war.

Used to be a holiday smell. The family roadtrip stops at the historic marker on the seaside bluff: grassed-over battlements, mossy gun turrets, plugged cannons covering a peaceful sea. Here in NZ there’s Maungauika, or North Head, up in Auckland. We can only visit such places because they’re retired. The fear that built them has passed. Give the cannon a friendly slap: This is how it was. I was always too young to add: May it never come again. And now—

Know that old song? The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming.

Something’s coming. But it ain’t gonna be the Yanks.

Not for Ukraine. Not for the UK or any “random country.”

Not for New Zealand, if the Chinese fleet ever returns.

For Greenland.

When my family first landed here, after a overnight from Shanghai in the weird early days of the pandemic, we stood out on Lower Hutt’s Petone Beach and gulped a fresh southerly straight from the South Pole. Much of our joy was simply NZ’s crazy clean air. But we knew in our bones that we were back safe inside the Western bubble. My passport made me family. My badass military was no longer a rival, but a protector.

After Trump’s sandbagging of Zelensky in the Oval Office last week, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon sided with Ukraine. When a reporter asked if he still trusted Trump, Luxon could only splutter that he trusted “the American president” and “the American system,” not daring to summon the beast by name. He’s not alone in his hesitation. The Labour opposition have declared they wouldn’t join AUKUS, the Indo-Pacific alliance of traditional besties the US, the UK, and Australia. Even before the Chinese ships arrived, Kiwis online were wishing New Zealand would simply vanish off the map.

Europe has no such joke.

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

feels the shadow on a visit to the beach at Dunkirk, still strewn with rusting shipwrecks: “The unthinkable is all we’re thinking about these days.”

NZ’s thinking, too. Kind of? War memory is thinner here. Kiwi military remembrance usually skips all the way back to World War I; its all-purpose symbol is a poppy grown on a battlefield 11,000 miles away.

The Chinese warships were mainly buzzing Australia, staying maybe a thousand miles off New Zealand at their closest point. Still, it’s the farthest south such ships have ever sailed. “The point,” one expert here noted, “is to show to Australia and New Zealand that China could cut our air and sea links without any warning.” As NZ indie greats The Clean sang in more cheerful days: Anything could happen / and it could be right now.

And New Zealand just ain’t ready. Out in the regions even a posted sign is a rare beach find, much less a golem-sized culvert. I adore this edge-of-the-world vibe, but the view changes with battleships on the horizon. NZ’s long underfunded navy has been a bit player in past American war games meant to piss off the Chinese. Now it’s down to eight ships after some yahoo accidentally sunk the HMNZS Manawanui last October. Here’s your measure of preparedness: six months later, the NZDF hasn’t even taken down the Manawanui’s webpage.

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But I don’t want New Zealand to curl up and hide! I don’t want America to turn villain! I want a life both here and there. I’m a Pax Americana soul caught in a Great Powers world. I miss the old days already.

Now we’re regressing lickety-split to the human mean, where coastal battlements are basic fact of life. Auckland was once full of fortified Māori pā with commanding views of the harbour. The English built the Mangauika battery in 1885 in fear of the Russians, of all people. The two great empires were then fighting over Afghanistan. Historians call it the Great Game. There is nothing new under the sun.

Maybe Chinese guns will rattle the Tasman again—or Taiwan, or Vietnam. Maybe they’ll build a base in the Cook Islands. Maybe next time they’ll just shoot at Australia.

Whatever happens, the Iron Giant ain’t coming. The Wild Robot, the Transformers, the giant battlebots of Pacific Rim—American fantasy guardians all—they ain’t coming. The USS George Washington is not coming. That’s a real aircraft carrier. The USS Abraham Lincoln ain’t coming either. New Zealand’s gonna have to pour its own concrete, and pour it fast.

wild robot books > wild robot movie

The next morning we walked back out to the beach. In the golden light the culvert was just a culvert. My son built something in the sand and then climbed up on the pipes to admire the view.

It’s funny when your kid finds some perch higher than you. You spend their whole lives looking at the tops of their fuzzy little heads, and suddenly they’re soaring over you like some winged beast from the future, haloed in the sun.

At school they call him the American, but he will not remember the Pax Americana. Lord knows what madness he’ll see in his life. This moment, right now, will be his baseline. This will be the way his world works.

“I like your sandcastle,” I said.

He smiled down at me. “It’s a submarine.”

He’s got a dream lately to visit the Mariana Trench. They teach that stuff in school. The highest, the deepest, the extremes to which we humans can go.

I don’t know when to tell him that submarines are mostly made for war.

I don’t know when to tell him the country we live in doesn’t have one. //

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