Australia's American Alliance

Towards a New Era?

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• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780522868616
• eBook ISBN: 9780522868623
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Part I

The US alliance and Australia’s strategic policy

CHAPTER 1

Wrestling with commitment

Geography, alliance institutions and the ANZUS treaty

Stephan Frühling

Alliance treaties create both expectations and obligations of support for all signatories. Having signed such a treaty, states must decide how much emphasis they will place on either aspect when they decide how to develop, structure and employ their armed forces, and when they consider what steps they might take to give additional political credence to their commitments. Do they consider the alliance as a political pledge between states that otherwise maintain their sovereign and independent defence postures, or should the alliance instead be a measure for pursuing efficiency in defence through military integration? To what extent should foreign and economic policy be integrated through the alliance, and what roles would they play in achieving the alliance treaty’s aims? In addition, allies of the United States are confronted with the question how they can influence US policy preferences and outcomes, given that the United States has strategic commitments around the globe that will invariably distract its attention from any one ally’s neighbourhood, and is far less reliant on any one particular ally for its own security than the other way around.

Answers to all of these questions are inherently political. While they are amenable to strategic analysis of policy options and their consequences, ultimately they are rooted in judgements about trust in the ally. This notion of trust is built on the coincidence of interests, on the importance of common values; and the weighing up of risk and promise of and alternatives to the leap of faith that relying on others inevitably entails. In Australia’s case, these questions also remain particularly pertinent and often difficult to answer. Australia’s immediate neighbourhood is far less relevant to the direct defence of the continental United States than is Western Europe, or even Northeast Asia. In military and economic power, the United States towers over all of its allies. Unlike the European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Australia and New Zealand could never balance this through their sheer number, and since the 1980s Australia’s US alliance has effectively become a bilateral one. But while the United States’ other bilateral alliances in Asia are largely one-directional extensions of guarantees by the United States, the ANZUS treaty places the same obligations on all its signatories. In practice, however, the ‘Pacific area’ in the ANZUS treaty gives its obligations a geographic scope far beyond that which would be necessary for the immediate defence of the treaty partners alone, and therefore links Australia to US commitments in Northeast Asia to which it itself is not directly party.¹

In the early years of the alliance, Australia had hoped to build similarly close and institutionalised links to US strategic decision-making and planning as the ones that emerged in NATO. The Australia–US alliance is rooted in the same shared values as NATO, in the historical and cultural links of the ‘Anglosphere’ that are even closer than those between many NATO members, and embedded in intelligence cooperation between the ‘Five Eyes’ countries that goes far beyond similar arrangements in any other alliance. Nonetheless, this chapter will demonstrate that the influence of the alliance on Australian (and US) strategic policy has always been far less comprehensive that the commitments of the NATO alliance.

The main reason for this is that direct defence of the allies was never a focal point of the US–Australia alliance, as there was little direct threat to Australia, and little interest on the United States to get too closely involved in Australia’s immediate neighbourhood. Over time, Australia learned to live with an ally that was always distant in geographic terms, and often also fickle in its strategic attention. When Australia and the United States worked together closely, it was always in relation to operations in the broader Pacific area or beyond. Cooperation waxed and waned with the extent to which both had a coinciding interest in regional security outcomes, but always remained subject to broader developments in the global security environment. In the era of ‘forward defence’, when Australia focused on the defence of Southeast Asia against communist expansion, this led to nascent institutionalisation of the relationship in the South-East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). However, these remained abortive attempts, victim to the strategic attention of both allies that tended to be drawn back to issues closer to their respective homes.

The era of self-reliance following the Vietnam War therefore embodied Australia’s acceptance of the limits of its alliance with the United States. These limits mattered relatively little while the US position in Asia was unchallenged and there was also no significant threat to Australia itself. Today, however, both of these conditions do not hold true anymore. Australia is living in a region where the possibility of a great power threat is not as remote as it was in the past, and where the recent Force Posture Initiative signals a growing importance of Australia’s geographic position to the United States. The rise of Asia, and in particular the growth and expansion of China, means that increasingly that nation has credible military options not only to threaten US allies and US forces in Northeast Asia but also to threaten Australia itself.

While the potential need for, and value of, US military assistance to Australia therefore becomes more relevant, what remains to be seen is whether in this new era, Australia will be any more successful than in the past in using its geographic position to gain influence on the United States; whether it can do so without much greater political–military institutionalisation of the alliance; and whether it would, in the end, even want to do so, given that a closer alliance would also bind Australia ever closer to US strategic commitments in the region. Behind the bipartisan veneer of political support for an ever-stronger alliance, the structural tensions that have challenged Australian strategic policy since World War II therefore remain as acute as ever.

This chapter traces the role of the Australia–US alliance in Australia’s strategic policy. In the first half, it examines the geographic scope of the alliance, its distinct lack of alliance institutions, and how Australia has instead sought to make use of geography as a means to influence the United States. In the second half, it discusses how Australia and the United States have been drawn closer together since the Cold War through geostrategic change in Asia and operations in the Middle East, and finishes with a discussion of the enduring limits of the alliance.

An expansive but limited alliance: The ‘Pacific area’ and ‘self-reliance’

Given Australia’s geographic position—a vast and largely empty continent in a region with the world’s most populous countries; its culture—as a predominantly European country in Asia; and its history—in particular, the failure of Great Britain to defend its Asian base in Singapore; it is not difficult to fathom why Australia sought a US defence guarantee after World War II. Tellingly, however, historians still debate why the United States acquiesced to sign the ANZUS treaty in 1951. Some see the treaty as part of the broader containment of communism; others as a quid pro quo for the peace treaty with Japan; or to encourage Australia’s (and New Zealand’s) commitment to the defence of the Middle East. In any case, the United States rejected Australian suggestions to limit the treaty’s geographic scope to the area south of the equator as insufficient for US interests. Instead, Article 4 refers simply to ‘an armed attack on the metropolitan territory of any of the Parties, or on the island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific, or on its armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific’. Hence, the ANZUS treaty does not apply to Australia’s Indian Ocean approaches and territories, but US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles left no doubt that the United States thought the new treaty did commit Australia and New Zealand to the defence of US forces in Japan.²

The geographic scope of the ANZUS treaty commitments and the question of US interests in the alliance are therefore intrinsically linked, and present an enduring quandary for Australia—and, to a lesser extent, for the United States as well. On the one hand, the treaty at the heart of the Australia–US alliance is very extensive, in that it links Australia to US strategic commitments in Northeast Asia, but over which Australia has little direct say or influence. On the other hand, the United States did not acquire any greater direct interest in Australia’s own commitments in the ‘Pacific area’. Australia’s immediate region is, among its Asian allies, the one that matters least to the United States, in which sense the alliance is also the most limited. This became evident in Australia’s conflicts with Indonesia, which focused on the future of West Papua in the late 1950s and Soekarno’s Konfrontasi (Confrontation) with Malaysia in the 1960s. The United States’ main concern in both cases was that Indonesia would not be pushed into the embrace of the Soviet Union.

After repeated enquiries by Australia, in 1963 President Kennedy clarified that the ANZUS treaty would apply in case of open aggression by Indonesia against Australian forces in Malaysia, but that military support would even then not necessarily be forthcoming and that it would, in any case, be limited to sea and air forces and logistic support. In addition, the United States expected Australia to consult before any Australian commitment of forces, and to avoid of any measures that could be perceived as provocative.³ Concerns about Indonesia drove Australia’s defence build-up of the early 1960s, which included the acquisition of F-111 bombers and Charles F. Adams-class destroyers from the United States. As in the decades that followed, it was the existence of the US alliance that allowed Australia to maintain a military capability edge over its immediate region. At the same time, however, it was also the limits of that same alliance that made this advantage a strategic necessity.

In 1976, the Australian Defence Committee therefore found: ‘Regarding developments fundamentally affecting Australia’s security or the strategic interests of the United States itself … the reliability of US support appears not to be in doubt.’ Less clear cut, however, were situations where Australia’s ‘essential security would not be threatened’.⁴ The United States would assist Australia against external threat only if its own obligations and credibility as an ally were involved, but ‘US action could be less than Australia sought, or other than Australia preferred’.⁵ In a passage that has lost little relevance, the Committee noted:

[T]he US might react quite strongly to some militarily ‘low-level’ situation, which, however, exposed its own interests—such as small-scale harassment of Australia by the USSR or some dispute involving Law of the Sea. But it might well prefer to let Australia carry the military brunt of a more substantial situation, such as trouble with Indonesia about PNG [Papua New Guinea] … In circumstances such as Australian military intervention against secession by Bougainville, US military help could not be expected.⁶

The principle of ‘self-reliance’ therefore meant ‘Australian defence planning should ensure a substantial capability for independence in military operations regarding issues assessed as likely to be of lesser consequence to US interests’.⁷ The alliance logic of self-reliance meant that Australia’s main contribution would be to look after its own region,⁸ which is a consideration that is often overlooked given the prominence of the ‘Defence of Australia’ during that time. Most of the situations that the Defence Committee discussed as relevant to ‘self-reliance’ in 1976 were a consequence of Australia’s own foreign commitments, especially to the external and internal security of Papua New Guinea. The 1986 Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities also contained a classified annex discussing the force structure requirements for defending Papua New Guinea against Indonesia.⁹ Indeed, the Australian-led INTERFET intervention in East Timor in 1999 clearly demonstrated the limits of US support to Australia’s own regional security concerns. A few months after the United States had led NATO in a war with Serbia over that country’s human rights violations, the Clinton Administration refused to make but a token military contribution to Australia’s effort to deal with similar issues to its north. US Marines remained offshore, and Prime Minister Howard later commented that ‘we all felt a bit sort of alone on it [sic]’.¹⁰

An alliance without institutions

While an alliance is based on a treaty commitment, both sides still need to form more precise—and reliable—expectations of what support they could expect, or might be willing to provide, in what situations. It is to form, to gain confidence in, and to give credibility to more detailed commitments and understandings, which link the letter of the treaty to the practical concerns of the real world that allies may decide to institutionalise an alliance. This is most extensively the case in NATO, which includes permanent political and military decision-making forums—the North Atlantic Council (NAC) and the Military Committee; a permanent multinational command structure and numerous headquarters; as well as a host of subsidiary functional bodies a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I. The US alliance and Australia’s strategic policy
• Part II. Strategic context
• Part III. Mechanics of alliance cooperation
• Part IV. Managing trade-offs
• Appendix: ANZUS Treaty
• Bibliography
• Index