So, Shame Jones is officially trying to sell our country to Donald Trump, by negotiating a secret critical minerals deal behind everyone's back. My immediate reaction - along with a lot of other people's - is "fuck that"! And there are all sorts of good reasons why we should not be pursuing any deals with the US - and the Trump regime in particular - at present.
Firstly, there's the US's present status as a rogue nation. Aotearoa depends on a rules-based international order, but as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney pointed out, the United States has destroyed that order. We should not be rewarding them for doing so. Instead, following Carney's suggestion, we should be working with other like-minded countries to reconfigure the international order around the US. Which means no deals.
Secondly, there's Trump himself. It ought to be obvious to any observer by now that Trump does not regard any "deal" as binding on him, instead viewing them as a form of criminal interview, testing whether his chosen victim will resist escalation or comply. Just look at his various "deals" with Canada: he broke NAFTA to force them to negotiate the USMCA, then broke that by imposing tariffs, then broke the settlement he reached on that with more tariffs, and on and on it goes (Trump is currently threatening tariffs against Canada for making a trade deal with China, and is going to ground half the US domestic air passenger fleet by attacking the Canadian aircraft industry). So there is simply no point to making any "deal" with him, and instead we ought to be refusing to on principle, simply because his word can't be trusted.
And then of course there's the fascism... should we really be supplying critical minerals to a fascist state who will use them to wage war on the world (and on China, our largest trading partner) and oppress its own people?
We should have no fucking part of any of this. Even if you thought the US was once our ally, that situation has clearly changed. The US is now a nakedly predatory power, openly threatening its allies while working with imperialist Russia to enable aggression. I don't think any New Zealander wants that sort of world. And while Trump won't last forever, the underlying dynamics in the US political system which have brought them to this don't seem like they'll change any time soon. We shouldn't be making deals with them under these circumstances. Instead, we should cut them out of our lives as much as possible, and work with like-minded nations to build a new world system which does not depend on them. A regime which meets this situation by seekign deals with the US are simply quislings and traitors.
