On Obama and Key

I get a lot of emails from American readers about life in New Zealand. Here is the latest.

My husband & I spent a month in NZ Aug/Sep to see if we could live there if things get Really Dicey here. Question; Is John Key just naive about Obama, stupid or complicit??

I feel like he's naive but would love to know what you think. When he put the pics of him with Obama at the UN up on his Twitter account I became concerned.


Here's my reply;

I hope you enjoyed your stay here. I could open an immigration consultancy with the number of enquiries I get from concerned Americans.

Re John Key.

A very likeable guy, with many good personal qualities, but in my opinion a
little left leaning and very naïve on security matters.

John Key seems to think he is a Kiwi Obama-fresh faced underdog taking on the
establishment. He likes to compare himself to "The One" and would probably
have his babies if he could.

To be fair, that type of naivety is still very prevalent in a New Zealand, media trained to think all Republican presidents are in league with Satan.

John Key's father fought in the Spanish Civil war and spoke Russian-so its likely he was on the communist side. John's mother was an Austrian Jewess-a refugee from the Nazis-possibly also a leftist. Young John was raised by his widowed mother in State Housing, in one of the poorer suburbs of Christchurch.

So though John Key is a self made multi-millionaire, I suspect there are some lingering leftist sympathies in his psyche. I very much doubt that John Key would ever take a hard stand against the Chinese or any other significant threat to NZ.

I hope I'm wrong about that, but i don't think I am.

I think John Key, is a pretty benevolent chap and thinks that people like
president Obama and those nice people in Beijing see the world the same way.

Though I initially liked John Key a lot, I went a bit sour on him recently-mainly over his refusal to act on a referendum which showed overwhelming public support for
the lifting on New Zealand's ban on smacking children. Perhaps I'm a little biased?

I think New Zealand has a lot of advantages and I wouldn't live anywhere else, but if Obama succeeds in wrecking the US economy and downsizing the US military to Costa Rican levels, this country will rapidly be "Finlandized" (at best) by the Chinese and similar nice people.

To sum up, I don't think New Zealand can offer any better than temporary refuge, under the current leadership.

I see the strong possibility of civil unrest in America's future. New Zealand
would be a safe haven from that type of threat, but not in the context of the
overall geopolitical picture.

If the US goes down, the West goes down. That's my view.

Hope this helps.

What do you think of my analysis?