New Zealand on Thursday dismissed High Commissioner to Britain Phil Goff after comments he made about U.S. President Donald Trump. File Photo by Etienne Laurent/EPA-EFE
March 6 (UPI) — New Zealand dismissed its high commissioner to Britain on Thursday after he likened a U.S.-led initiative to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict to the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and questioned U.S. President Donald Trump‘s knowledge of history.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters called Phil Goff‘s comments during a live streamed event in London on Tuesday “deeply regrettable” and said they had made the position of the veteran diplomat and government minister “untenable,” leaving him with no choice but to recall him from the United Kingdom.
“When you’re in that position, you represent the government and the policies of the day — you’re not able to free-think; you are the face of New Zealand,” he said.
However, Peters insisted he would have made the same call regardless of the leader whose competence was being called into question by an official representative of the New Zealand government.
Goff was expounding on how Winston Churchill stood as a lone voice against the 1938 Munich Agreement handing part of then-Czechoslovakia to Hitler when he referenced Trump, noting he had “restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office.”
“But do you think he really understands history?” Goff asked host Finnish foreign minister Elina Valtonen at the event titled “Keeping the Peace on NATO’s longest border with Russia” at Chatham House, a British think-tank.
Goff made the comment after telling the audience how Churchill, who went on to lead Britain after war engulfed Europe just as he had predicted, in a speech to Parliament slammed then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for preferring “dishonor over war” by accepting Hilter’s pledges of peace and taking part in negotiations from which Czechoslovakia was excluded.
“You had the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, yet you will have war,” Goff quoted Churchill as saying.
The United States is New Zealand’s second-largest market after China for exports of its world-renowned agricultural produce, shipping $9 billion worth of goods, 12% of all exports, in 2024, New Zealand government figures show and Goff’s recall comes amid efforts by New Zealand to avoid doing anything to upset the apple cart.
Former Prime Minister Helen Clark defended Goff, querying whether the question Goff had posed was grounds for dismissal of a “highly respected former [New Zealand] foreign minister,” and calling it a “new low bar” for the ruling New Zealand Party government of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
“One assumes NZ Govt is super sensitive to Trump Administration. Prima facie the question is not a sackable offense,” Clark wrote on her account on X.