John Daniel

Kit Bennett says what he finds concerning is that underpinning the Trump presidency, there seems to be a widespread appetite for the kind of America first politics that can shred alliances.

And that's deeply concerning.

Tim Weiner, the New York Times security and intelligence specialist, agrees that the people at the top of the Trump administration lack the seriousness of their predecessors.

Tim Weiner says that chaos would present an opportunity.

And so, while there is a school of thought that this is all kind of business as usual for American interests, minus the usual hypocrisy, more and more people and governments, close allies of America, are concerned that Donald Trump's America is abusing its power to extract short-term gains for itself, and those will weaken the Western Democratic Alliance in the long run.

War with Iran might spiral out of control, if it isn't ready.

Or the Americans might go back and push harder on Greenland.

Yeah, and look, realistically, here in New Zealand, we're not going to have much influence over any of those things.

So let's try to understand where we can have an impact.

First of all, if we're going to have these intelligence services, we want them to be good in every sense of the word.

Kit Bennett says having good people is a crucial start.

That was the old SIS headquarters in central Wellington where my mother used to work.

Kit Bennett says he found himself with a small handful of people, including the deputy director at the time, Ron Biggs, looking down on a large crowd.

Ultimately, politicians are responsible, not simply for running our intelligence agencies, but the extent to which they are intertwined with our allies.

In 2010, Wikileaks published cables intercepted between the U.S.

Embassy in Wellington and the State Department in Washington.

The U.S.

ambassador at the time described New Zealand as split into two camps when it came to our view of the U.S.,

First worlders, effectively a pro-US faction who he said were made up of defence, intelligence, foreign affairs, business leaders and a few politicians.

And there's a spectrum of responses here, from thinking this is groupthink gone mad to seeing it as experts who have a strong, responsible hand on the tiller because they're the people who have to actually run national security.