Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands since the First World War

T. B. Millar has pointed out that “there were 113 years from the First Fleet to federation of the Australian colonies, and nearly 40 more years before an Australian government took independent action in foreign affairs”¹ Foreign affairs are related essentially to defense and security. While distance may have exerted some tyranny over Australian economic development, it did have some advantages. Sydney, the terminal port of an imperial shipping line, was twelve thousand miles from Europe and remote from threats of military attack. Asia was closer, but Japan alone in the twentieth century possessed a powerful fleet. Like the Monroe Doctrine in the nineteenth century, Australian security rested on the broad back of the British navy.

Australian nationalism contributed to federation in 1901 and to the demand for a separate Australian navy, finally to be integrated into the Royal Navy. Nationalism was immensely strengthened by the landings at Gallipoli in 1915, which resulted in the development of the Anzac legend, and also by participation in the military campaigns in France and Palestine. The new self-confidence, largely bred on the battlefields, brought membership of the Imperial War Cabinet, separate representation at the Peace Conference in 1919, and foundation membership of the League of Nations. Dominion status was a heady concept leading to a demand for a greater measure of autonomy in foreign relations, but Australia remained reluctant to assume the financial responsibilities for defense and diplomatic representation.

The Paris Peace Conference produced the first serious initiative in Australian foreign policy and a head-on collision between President Woodrow Wilson and William Morris Hughes, the fiery Welsh-born prime minister of Australia. The points of controversy were the future of German colonies south of the equator and the principle of racial equality. The battle over a mandate system for German colonies led to the famous confrontation between the two men, who did not understand one another and whose policies were diametrically opposed. “Mr. Hughes, am I to understand that if the whole world asks Australia to agree to a mandate in respect of those islands, Australia is prepared still to defy the appeal of the whole civilized world?” “That’s about the size of it, President Wilson,” replied Hughes as he moved his ear trumpet close to the president. He subsequently reminded Wilson that he “represented sixty thousand dead.”² Hughes helped mobilize West Coast opinion in the United States against President Wilson on the question of racial equality put forward by Japan as an amendment to the Covenant of the League of Nations. He regarded it as a threat to Australia’s restrictive immigration policy. Wilson declared the Japanese amendment lost because the vote was not unanimous.

Friction between Australia and the U.S. over the Versailles settlement persisted over the future of the Anglo-Japanese alliance and the problem of stability in East Asia. It was aggravated by Australia’s attempt to secure separate representation at the Washington Conference in 1921–1922. Washington did not understand the new Australian nationalism, and London regarded it as adolescent and simplistic in the area of foreign policy. The end result was the inclusion of Sir George Pearce, the Australian defense minister, in the British delegation. In Australia it was thought that the network of treaties signed at Washington would stabilize the situation in the Far East; in fact it established Japanese naval preponderance in the western Pacific.³

Australia’s independent initiative in foreign policy in 1919–1920 was short-lived, and for almost two decades it lapsed into semi-isolation. The Washington Conference in 1922 and criticisms of British policy at Chanak were in a sense a swan song as “men, markets, and money” became the central issues of Australian politics. Strategically the Singapore base, regarded essentially as a British project in a commonwealth context, became the key point of Australian defense policy.

Such interest as Australia had in foreign policy was centered on the Commonwealth of Nations and a barren attempt to obtain a common imperial foreign policy. The battle for dominion autonomy was won by the Balfour Declaration (1926). The Statute of Westminster (1931) put into concrete legislative form the finely spun phrases of the Balfour Declaration. Australia (and New Zealand) was largely content with status rather than function and was less active than Canada and South Africa in taking initiatives in foreign policy. In 1924 Australia had appointed R. G. Casey as its liaison officer in London, reporting direct to the prime minister. Foreign affairs were handled by the Prime Minister’s Department until 1935, when a separate Department of Foreign Affairs was established. Australian information about international affairs was thus largely derivative. It was not until 1942 that Australia ratified the Statute of Westminster: autonomy meant a willingness to have affairs rather than relations. That inability to formulate a foreign policy led in the long, rather than the short, term to what J. R. Poynter has called “yo-yo variations” in policy at a variety of levels—political, military, and economic.⁴

The real question was, who held the strings? Lacking independent sources of information and diplomatic posts abroad, Australia depended on consultation with London. There was a flow of dispatches from London to Canberra, but it was difficult to determine whether there was real consultation before decisions were taken by Whitehall. In 1938 Casey expressed the view that consultation was the important thing so that a commonwealth foreign policy might be framed that would “attain the common aims of all members and at the same time serve Australian national and regional interests…. British foreign policy may accordingly be regarded in a very real sense as Australian foreign policy.” London obviously held the yo-yo string.⁵ During the Munich crisis, Australian Prime Minister J. A. Lyons seemed content to be supplied with information rather than being formally requested for “the expression of an opinion by Australia or for any acceptance by Australia of the responsibility which would flow from active participation in the shaping of policy.”⁶

It was an increasing restiveness with, and concern about, Australian security and British policy that led Lyons to take the initiative in proposing the establishment of a regional security system through the conclusion of a Pacific pact. Japanese expansion in China (1931–1937) breached the Washington treaty system of 1921–1922 and threw a long shadow south of the equator. The Lyons proposals for a Pacific pact which might replace the Washington agreements met with a lukewarm reception in the United States and all the other centers of power. This lonely Australian initiative failed; Australia continued to rely on Britain as the protecting angel and to speak with a muted voice. That voice was so muted that the U.S., as late as the 1940s, saw the dominions as the “nondescript appendages” they had seemed in the 1920s. On the other hand, despite the close economic ties spelled out in the Ottawa preference system, strain developed between Canberra and London over defense priorities. Britain’s interests were primarily European, while Australia became increasingly concerned with the changing balance of power in East Asia, where Japan’s expansionist policies posed new threats to regional security. The result was “a radical solution to [Australia’s] dilemmas in the form of a separate Australian diplomacy.”⁷ Casey became the first Australian ambassador to Washington in May 1940, and J. G. Latham took up his post in Tokyo later that year.

The essential change in Australian foreign policy at the end of the interwar period was the growing reorientation of Australian foreign policy toward the Pacific and especially the establishing of closer relations with the U.S. This essay is mainly concerned with that reorientation. The pioneer flight of Kingsford Smith’s Southern Cross from San Francisco to Brisbane in 1928 foreshadowed a closer physical relation between the two countries, but the ocean shrank slowly until new developments in aircraft took place.

Australian relations with the U.S. after the Ottawa Conference in 1932 were primarily economic. The chronic imbalance in trade between the two countries was approximately four to one in America’s favor. The crunch came when Australia adopted the “trade diversion policy” in 1936, a disastrous experiment designed to rectify that imbalance with the U.S. and Japan. Pearce, Australia’s minister for external affairs, told the American consul general in Sydney, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, that “the feeling of comradeship and confidence [between Australia and the United States] had now almost entirely disappeared.”⁸ Raymond Esthus, in his From Enmity to Alliance, has exaggerated the extent of friction. There was perhaps irritation and frustration, perhaps yo-yo variations in relations, but not enmity. There was some resentment of general American attitudes on economic matters after the “trade diversion policy” ended in 1937, and wool, meat, and zinc continued to bedevil economic relations in the post–Pearl Harbor era.

The exchange of ministers in 1940 contributed to the removal of misunderstanding between Washington and Canberra. Casey quickly established rapport with Cordell Hull. The main thrust of Australian policy at that stage was to secure American cooperation in the use of the Singapore base. The State Department resisted all pressure to send American ships to visit Singapore as an indication to Japan of American concern with the security of Southeast Asia, but some warships did visit Sydney and Auckland in April 1941, perhaps as a hint of American interests in the region.

As Hartley Grattan has pointed out, Australia was a country of low visibility in Washington until the full impact of Japan’s war-making capacity was felt; then it appeared above the horizon as an indispensable but menaced base. Pearl Harbor was the catalyst. On December 27, 1941, the Australian prime minister made his dramatic appeal for American assistance. “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links of kinship with the United Kingdom.” John Curtin’s appeal did not involve a breach of relations with the United Kingdom but, rather, a reorientation of defense and foreign policies hypnotized by the belief in the impregnability of the Singapore base. His appeal met with an immediate response, primarily for American strategic reasons.⁹ Brig. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had already advised Lt. Gen. George C. Marshall (December 14) that “Australia was the base nearest the Philippines that we could hope to establish and maintain and the necessary line of air communications would therefore follow along the islands intervening between that continent and the Philippines. If we were to use Australia as a base it was mandatory that we procure a line of communication leading to it. This meant that we must instantly move to save Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand and New Caledonia, and we had to make certain of the safety of Australia herself.” Marshall replied laconically, “I agree with you…. Do your best to save them.” Australia was strategically indispensable for the conduct of the Pacific war and the defeat of Japan.¹⁰ President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already decided (October 28) that the defense of Australia was vital to that of the U.S.

Curtin’s appeal to the U.S. meant, not the cutting of the umbilical cord with Great Britain, but an independent assessment of Australian strategic and foreign policy when the international scene had changed dramatically since the heyday of British imperialism. Australia realized that matriarchy was inadequate. Where did power lie? Which was the “powerful and willing friend” upon which a small independent state could rely for support to preserve its independence?

As Australia became the springboard for a joint offensive against Japanese armies in Southeast and East Asia, it experienced for the first time a mass contact with Americans. Almost a million Amercan servicemen used Australia as a Southwest Pacific base in the war against Japan or visited Australia for recuperation. The typical American image of Australia “as a large blank continent with a zoological sense of humor” was modified by the large influx of Americans.¹¹ Despite minor clashes between troops with different outlooks and rates of pay, which led inevitably to fierce competition for feminine favors, a wider understanding developed between the two countries. Mutual respect replaced suspicion, and many Australians began to look eastward across the Pacific as well as westward to Europe and Britain.¹²

Increasing Australian awareness of California and of the East Coast of the United States was accompanied by a rethinking of Australian priorities in foreign policy and defense. The independence which had led to clashes with Churchill was matched by a growing Australian insistence on consultation by the U.S. on policy issues, strategic and political, in the Pacific war. Although H. V. Evatt in his first speech on foreign policy (November 27, 1941) had stated that the “recent change of Government in this country does not imply any vital change in Australia’s foreign policy,” he was primarily responsible for the reorientation of Australian wartime and postwar foreign policies. His firm insistence that Australia was an independent middle power rather than a British imperial satellite led the American government to agree that Australia should sign the instrument of surrender with Japan and become the commonwealth member of the Allied Council in Japan.

The Evatt period in Australian postwar foreign policy (1945—1949) was marked by an essentially nationalistic approach to problems and by a sensitivity to a recognition of Australian rights. In a sense there was a return, sometimes abrasive, to the anti-British nationalism of the 1890s. Dr. Evatt glimpsed the need to find, as Sir Robert Menzies later said, a new “powerful and willing friend” to protect Australia against external threats. He knew that the 1939 power structure in the Pacific had disappeared, that western colonial empires had collapsed, and that new nation states were emerging in Asia. He challenged the great powers at San Francisco in 1945 on a number of issues¹³ and while recognizing the increasingly important role of the U.S. in the postwar Pacific, he disagreed with American policy in occupied Japan. He disliked the new American policy of using Japan as a bastion against the spread of communist influence in East Asia. His emphasis on the important role of the United Nations in international relations, leading to his election as president of the General Assembly in 1948, placed him far ahead of the rank-and-file members of the Australian Labor party (ALP) and of the Australian government. Washington regarded him as “an active source of both irritation and uncertainty.”¹⁴ The wartime honeymoon was over. The differences over the role of Japan in East Asia were strengthened by Australia’s fears that a new American-backed Japan might become a new threat to stability in Southeast Asia and to Australia’s security. On September 21, 1949, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed, and in December the Australian Labor party was defeated in the federal election. Menzies became the new prime minister and the Liberal-Country party coalition remained in power, despite cabinet changes, for a generation. On December 2, 1972, a Labor government was elected and Australian foreign policy in general, and Australian-American relations in particular, had to be reexamined.

To Australia, the central problem was one of security—how to prevent any threat of the post–Pearl harbor kind from developing. The Japanese bombing at Darwin on February 19, 1942, had brought home to Australia the inability of Great Britain to provide a defense shield. Despite the deep Menzies attachment to Great Britain and the commonwealth, it was evident that Australia needed a new “powerful and willing friend” to shield it from an attack. The potential threats were envisaged as coming from a resurgent, rearmed Japan or an expansionist China pursuing either ideological of traditional imperialistic objectives. Security became linked with the problem of the kind of peace treaty to be concluded with Japan and with the question of the recognition of the People’s Republic of China. The Korean War gave added point to Australian fears of the People’s Republic. Its swift decision to supply troops to the United Nations force in Korea, commanded by General MacArthur, was not unrelated to the hope of establishing a firm working arrangement with the U.S. in other areas in Asia. With the British commitment in Asia extending only to Singapore, with Hong Kong an exposed and undefendable outpost, and with American defense responsibilities ending at the Manila base, the main objective of Australian defense and foreign policy in this region centered round the closing of the gap between Manila and Singapore. That involved securing a firm American commitment to Southeast Asia. Evatt had tried to secure such a commitment by offering the U.S. a base on Manus Island.

The immediate problem in 1950 was the conclusion of a peace treaty with Japan. When John Foster Dulles visited Canberra on February 15, 1951, Percy Spender told him that the Australian government “was not prepared to accept a Japanese peace treaty unless: 1. reasonable limitations were written into the treaty against Japanese re-armament; 2. a satisfactory security arrangement in the Pacific was able to be agreed to. This arrangement should take the form of the tripartite pact between the three countries that I had been contending for.”¹⁵ Spender’s primary concern was a security treaty, and he insisted on concentrating discussion of that before dealing with the Japanese peace treaty. The substantial terms of the treaty were agreed upon at that time in Canberra, although it was not formally signed until September 1, a few hours after the text of the proposed Japanese peace treaty had been published.¹⁶

The ANZUS treaty became the central pillar of Australian security. “Each party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific area on any of the parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.” Article V provided that “an armed attack on any of the parties is deemed to include an armed attack on the metropolitan territory of any of the parties, or on the island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific.”¹⁷

The treaty was “an historical milestone” in Australian-American relations. It gave a firm basis to the vague relationship that had been inherited from the Second World War. It involved common assumptions about the chief threat to Pacific security and a reassessment of the relations between Australia and the United Kingdom. In a sense, it was a logical development from Curtin’s appeal in 1941. Spender told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on March 15, 1950, that the main Australian objective was “to build up with the United States somewhat the same relationship as exists with the British Commonwealth.”¹⁸ Despite Churchill’s considerable objections, a British request to send observers to the first meeting of ANZUS ministers to discuss defense problems was rejected.¹⁹

The second important link in the American alliance was the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), set up by the Manila treaty on September 8, 1954. The collapse of French power in Indochina produced both the Geneva settlement and the loosely drawn SEATO treaty, designed to stabilize the region and to commit western as well as Asian powers to the checking of aggression. The obligations assumed by the eight signatories were similar to those binding the three ANZUS partners: “to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes” and immediate consultation “in order to agree on the measures which should be taken for the common defence” of any state whose territory or political independence was threatened. There was no automatic commitment to action under either treaty. Although Australia deliberately declined to sign the American understanding attached to the Manila treaty, that “action would apply only to Communist aggression,” it accepted the American view that the chief danger to stability in Southeast Asia came from Chinese expansion, ideological or imperialistic. Casey felt that the treaty gave Australia two strings to its bow and flatly rejected a suggestion from Dulles that the ANZUS treaty should go out of existence.

Attempts were made to clarify some of the loose phrases²⁰ in the two treaties. ANZUS council meetings in Canberra in 1962 and Wellington in 1963 made it clear that the treaty umbrella also covered the Territory of Papua–New Guinea: “…a threat to any of the partners in the area, metropolitan and island territories alike, is equally a threat to the others.” The ANZUS treaty declared in simple and direct terms that in matters of defense Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. stand as one. Australian attempts to include Borneo and Malaysia in the treaty area when confrontation developed between Indonesia and Malaysia received little support from the State Department.²¹

SEATO action was at first handicapped by the convention that unanimity was necessary before any military initiatives could be taken. On March 6, 1962, the Rusk-Khoman agreement provided for unilateral aid by the United States to Thailand under the SEATO treaty when communist pressures built up along its borders. Australia and New Zealand, as well as Great Britain, followed the American lead and sent small forces to Thailand to bolster its defenses. This greater flexibility in interpreting obligations paved the way for Australian and New Zealand assistance to the U.S. in Vietnam. The specific inclusion of Papua–New Guinea in the ANZUS treaty area was an American quid for the Australian quo in Thailand and Vietnam. The decision to send thirty military instructors to Vietnam was announced on May 24, fifteen days after the ANZUS council meeting in Canberra.

The third link in the American alliance was the agreement for the use of Australian bases for communications purposes. Two days after the Canberra meeting of the ANZUS council, Australian Prime Minister Menzies announced the establishment of a naval communications center at North West Cape in Western Australia. A formal agreement, leasing a twenty-eight-acre site to the U.S. for at least twenty-five years, was not concluded for another year. The base was equipped with low-frequency radio to enable it to communicate with Polaris nuclear submarines in the Indian Ocean. The base was to be under sole American control but was to be used only for defense communication unless the Australian government expressly gave consent for its use for other purposes. The Australian minister for external affairs, Sir Garfield Barwick, justified the agreement on the ground that it would increase “the individual and collective capacity” of the ANZUS partners to “resist armed attack.” A deeply divided Labor opposition finally accepted the bill to establish the base as “a grim and awful necessity.” A special conference of the ALP federal executive voted nineteen to seventeen to support the bill. The debate made it clear that, should a change of government take place, an attempt would be made to renegotiate the agreement.²²

Subsequent agreements led to several other American installations: a Joint Defense Space Research Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and a Joint Defense Space Communications Center at Nurrungar to analyze and test data provided by American satellites. Other installations were equipped to monitor nuclear tests in the atmosphere, on the surface, and underground. None of them forms part of a weapons system, and Australia has access to the data provided by the installations.

The Australian commitment to American policies in Southeast Asia reached its peak as the war in Vietnam escalated after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964. The number of Australian advisers was increased to one hundred early in 1965. On April 29, Prime Minister Menzies announced the government’s decision to send an infantry battalion of eight hundred men to Vietnam.²³ The Australian force was increased by his successor, Harold Holt, to four thousand five hundred. After his sweeping victory in November 1966, largely on the issue of Vietnam, further increases took place. Partly as a result of a visit to Australia by Clark Clifford and General Maxwell Taylor on October 17, 1967, Holt told Parliament that the Australian task force in Vietnam would be increased to eight thousand by the dispatch of a third battalion and the necessary support troops. He firmly resisted suggestions by Clifford for a further increase in Australian forces.²⁴

The Australian decision to commit combat troops to Vietnam, to go “all the way with LBJ,” was justified by the government in terms of its SEATO obligations in the same way that President John F. Kennedy had responded to a request for aid in 1961. At the same time, Australia had in mind the long-term problem that dominated its views about security: the danger that could face Australia if a political vacuum developed in Southeast Asia. The government was aware that it could not from its own resources defend the country against external attack. It was necessary for Australia to find another “powerful and willing friend,” and the U.S. was the dominant power in the Pacific. As the United States became increasingly drawn into the Vietnamese quagmire, the Australian government looked at its obligations under the American alliance. The escalation of its forces in Vietnam from thirty military advisers to eight thousand combat troops was a calculated insurance policy to keep the ANZUS treaty alive.

The American alliance has never been a “debatable” alliance in the full sense of the term. There had been criticisms of particular American policies before Vietnam, but all major political parties accepted U.S. policies in principle. The Vietnam War, however, provided the catalyst for a reexamination of Australian foreign policies and the assumptions underlying them. As Whitlam said on March 10, 1966, “the Australian people are more divided on the issue of this war than on any in which they had ever been engaged.” Increasingly, criticism of the Vietnam War in the trade unions, in academic and church circles, and in the streets centered round a belief that the war was “an unnecessary and an unwinnable one.” The chorus of public disappointment matched criticism in the U.S. There was increasing support for the view that “we are fighting to protect an error in American foreign policy.”²⁵

Criticism centered in part on the nature of the American alliance and the relation between senior and junior partners in an alliance. Could a junior partner really influence important political or military decisions? Had the Vietnam War made Australia and New Zealand appear before the rest of the world “as satellites of the United States” and as sealed into “the alliance straitjacket into which they had deliberately fitted themselves?”²⁶ The government repeatedly claimed independence of action and vigorously denied the satellite suggestion. Evatt’s policy during the occupation of Japan and Menzies’s support for the United Kingdom over Suez in 1956 are two notable illustrations of independence of action in the early postwar years.²⁷ Australian ministers have always argued that the ANZUS treaty gave Australia a privileged access to the U.S. and that Canberra acted as a bridge between Washington, London, and various Asian capitals. There is much evidence to support this view and the assumption that “when you cannot live without your friends you do not argue with them or disagree with them in public.”²⁸ Although there were many opportunities for privileged access, it is less certain that they were used by Washington. When the crunch comes, the junior partner’s criticism may be brushed aside. Prime Minister John Gorton admitted the harsh realities of any alliance when he said that “if there were great changes in United States’ involvement in Vietnam, Australia would be forced to accept them.”²⁹

Closer military ties between Australia and America were accompanied by rapidly expanding economic relations. Australian exports rose from 8.3 percent (Canada and the U.S.) in 1937–1938 to 11.9 percent in 1966–1967 and 14.2 percent in 1968–1969. Imports were almost halved between 1937–1938 and 1950–1955 but rose to an average of about 25 percent in 1970–1971. Meat became by far the largest export (45 percent in 1970–1971) despite friction over quality and quotas. The American duty on wool imports remained a handy perennial in negotiations between the two countries. Trade with Japan expanded much more rapidly than with the U.S., and Japan replaced the United Kingdom as Australia’s best trading partner.³⁰ Overseas investment in Australia rose sharply during the 1960s, increasing more than threefold. The American share in investment increased slightly over the British, especially between 1965–1966 and 1970–1971. The economic ligaments between the two bodies politic had become very strong indeed, especially with the growth of American ownership of some sectors of Australian industry.³¹

Cultural relations between Australia and the United States expanded considerably between 1950, when the Fulbright and Smith–Mundt programs were introduced, and 1971, when the Australian-American Education Foundation replaced the earlier programs with substantially greater Australian financial support. The traditional intellectual pulls toward Oxford, Cambridge, and London became less strong; and Australian academics, graduates, students, and technical experts were increasingly attracted to American universities. Interest in Australian history, politics, and literature, however, remained confined to a handful of American universities.³²

The flow of people and ideas across the Pacific was accelerated when Pan American began its first commercial service from San Francisco to Sydney in 1945—seventeen years after the pioneer flight of the Southern Cross. British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines (BCPA) followed a year later, and the first Qantas plane crossed the Pacific in 1954. The publication of regional editions of Time, Newsweek, and part of the weekly edition of the New York Times expanded Australian knowledge of the United States. Wire services were expanded and Australian journalists were stationed in the U.S. Yet the flow of information and the expansion of knowledge was largely a one-way process despite sentimental memories and tourist visits.

The American alliance developed out of the wartime alliance, and it took shape during the postwar period in the atmosphere of the cold war. World politics became bipolar and, with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the central problem of foreign policy tended to become the containment of the spread of communism. That appeared to be the main threat to the stability of Southeast Asia and to the security of Australia: an expansive communist China had replaced a revived militant Japan as the potential danger. The deduction was clear: a powerful American presence was essential between Singapore and Tokyo now that the British presence in the region was much less visible.

The apparently monolithic communist world had disintegrated with the confrontation between Moscow and Peking and with discontent in eastern Europe. Japan had emerged as a major world economic power with a considerable military potential. Britain had entered the European Economic Community, and its presence in Asia became a token one as it decided to withdraw its military forces from Singapore. The nuclear balance had changed as France and China acquired a nuclear capacity while refusing to join the club. The rapid expansion of the Soviet navy and the entry of a Soviet fleet to the Indian Ocean foreshadowed a significant shift in the naval balance of power. The international balance of power had become at least quadrilateral rather than bipolar.

Washington had begun its own reassessment in the late 1960s as it realized the strength of internal opposition to its policy in Vietnam and recognized that it was overcommitted there. That reassessment led to a searching review of foreign policy priorities and a limitation on the range of American commitments. It was begun under President Lyndon B. Johnson and was largely completed by President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary Henry Kissinger. The new policy was sketched out at Guam on July 25, 1969, and then filled out in a series of major statements to Congress between February 18, 1970, and May 5, 1973.

It involved both a contraction of American commitments and a continued willingness to participate in the defense and development of allies and friends. The problem was one of dimensions and priorities: “America cannot—and will not—conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world. We will help where it makes a real difference and is considered in our interests.”³⁴

The new priorities meant a reversal of the Asian emphasis of Dulles in favor of Europe and a gradual detente with the Soviet Union, disengagement from Southeast Asia but not a retreat into isolationism. There were to be no more Koreas or Vietnams, but American treaty obligations were to be honored. The new priorities saw American interests in the Northwest Pacific outranking those in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. Tokyo and Peking became central and Australia peripheral to those interests. The Nixon visit to Peking reflected that new orientation. In a sense, the wheel had come full circle after a generation.

Australian rethinking of its foreign policy lagged behind the American. Before the election of 1972, Gorton had accepted the American decision to wind down the war in Vietnam and then withdraw. Prime Minister William McMahon began a revision of Australia’s China policy which moved belatedly toward a “Two China” policy in 1971. With the withdrawal of most British forces from Singapore and the formulation of the Nixon Doctrine, both “powerful and willing friends” were leaving the area regarded as crucial to Australian defense. This raised the question of the new implications of what Bruce Grant has called “loyalty to the protector.” Was a “protector” now necessary or possible in a world in which a new four-power balance would develop east of Suez?³⁵

The major reassessment of Australian foreign policy in general, and of the American alliance in particular, was made by Whitlam after the Labor party assumed office. Labor had been the party which, under Curtin, had forged the alliance or, in the words of A. A. Calwell, had “first forged the links which bind our nations”; it was also a nationalistic party which, under Evatt, had been very critical of great-power domination of wartime and postwar policies.

Whitlam saw Australia as a middle power whose interests were primarily regional rather than global despite a determination to diversify and widen the range of diplomatic contacts and to revise Australian policies in the United Nations. His five-point program involved national security, a secure and friendly Japan, independence for Papua–New Guinea, close relations with Indonesia, the removal of the taint of racism, and the promotion of “the peace and prosperity of our neighborhood.”³⁶ With those objectives went a deep awareness of the importance of Australia’s mineral resources and their effect on the policy options for Australia: strategic, political, and military.

Immediately after he became prime minister, Whitlam said that his new government would adopt “a more constructive, flexible and progressive approach to a number of issues…towards a more independent Australian stance in foreign affairs and towards an Australia which will be less militarily oriented and not open to suggestions of racism.”³⁷ But the only major new initiative was one that had been commenced by the previous government—namely, the recognition of Peking. The recognition of communist regimes in East Germany, North Vietnam, North Korea, and Poland was largely cosmetic, a gesture toward flexibility and the left-wing elements in the Australian Labor party.

In his first important speech on foreign policy, Whitlam said that the Labor government’s “mandate and duty” to maintain the American alliance was equally clear. “This,” he said, “we will do.”³⁸ The American decision to withdraw from Indochina removed the only serious difference between the two governments. But, at the same time, it was clear that Whitlam saw the alliance in a different perspective as he set out to end what he regarded as an imbalance in Australia’s foreign relations. The swift recognition of the People’s Republic of China and the withdrawal of the Australian ambassador to Taiwan were part of the effort to correct that imbalance. In a sense Australia was adopting a policy parallel to Washington’s, but it was a policy based on quite different premises.

The significant thing was his decision to convert the American “alliance” into the American “connection.” Inheriting the Evatt mantle and representing the “new nationalism,” he rejected the idea that Australia would automatically endorse American policies, and he repudiated emphatically the satellite syndrome, what Senator Fulbright referred to as almost “a semi-colonial relationship.” After Whitlam’s visit to Washington on July 29–30, 1973, he reported that “the American administration now fully accepts that Australia is not a small and relatively insignificant country as it was once called there, but a middle power of growing influence in the South-East Asian and South Pacific regions.” As the U.S. ambassador, Marshall Green, said: “It was a time to recognize that Australia has parallel interests with the United States but not necessarily identical ones…we were not locked in step and…were not trying to stand over you.”³⁹

As a pragmatic nationalist, Whitlam reexamined the main instruments of the American connection: ANZUS, SEATO, and the bases agreements. The ANZUS treaty still remains the centerpiece of the connection. At the same time it was not to be “the only significant factor in our relations with the United States” any more than “our relations with the United States are the only significant factor in Australia’s foreign relations.”⁴⁰ SEATO, the main legal basis for Australian intervention in Vietnam, was now much less useful and has now been largely dismantled as a military organization.

The status of American bases in Australia had always been criticized by the ALP while in opposition. The two central points of criticism were that the agreement involved a surrender of Australian sovereignty over part of its territory and that Australia had no control over messages received by the North West Cape base. The Australian fear was that the station might be used to send signals that could trigger a nuclear war in which the base itself and Australia could be targets. That fear was strengthened during the Middle East crisis of October 6, 1973, when a global alert was issued by Washington. Australia was not officially informed about the alert, which did apply to the North West Cape installation.⁴¹ Whitlam resisted left-wing pressures within the ALP to scrap the bases; they contribute, he said, “to the maintenance of global peace and security” and “specifically to the improvement and development of Australia’s defense system.” The 1963 agreement was renegotiated on January 9–10, 1974, so that the base would now be operated jointly, with Australian participation in its management, operation, and technical control. Australia established its own communications center, but the U.S. communications building remained wholly under American control.⁴²

Southeast Asia was the area where new evaluations were made. The end of the Vietnam War in March 1973, and the subsequent fall of Cambodia altered the whole strategic pattern. American troops were phased out of Thailand by July 1976. As Kissinger pointed out in a comment on the Nixon Doctrine, “We have commitments only in those areas where our interests are involved…. Where the difficulties arise are in the grey areas where historical evolution may take care of the requirement.”⁴³ The areas that are grey for the United States but vital for Australia are Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Papua–New Guinea. Here Australia formulated its own policies based on close relations with Indonesia and the abandonment of forward bases. American attitudes and policies will be only one part of the jigsaw puzzle. Where differences arise, discussion will take place privately rather than in banner headlines or television announcements.⁴⁴

The reorientation of Australian foreign policy in the grey areas of Southeast Asia involved the reduction of Australian military forces in Malaysia and Singapore under the Five-Power Defense Agreement and the winding down of military cooperation with SEATO. At the same time Whitlam tried to establish closer relations with the ASEAN nations—including closer economic ties and interest in proposals for a “zone of peace” in either or both of the Indian and Pacific oceans. But the establishment of closer ties with ASEAN was slowed by the recognition of Peking. Not even Australia’s upgrading of relations with Japan (as in the negotiations for expanding trade between Australia and Japan) did much to allay the suspicions of Australia’s new Asian policy among the ASEAN countries.

On the other hand, the public revision of Australia’s racial policies improved its image in Asia, the United States, and the Pacific islands as well as in Africa. In the UN General Assembly, Australia supported tough resolutions on Rhodesia, the Portuguese colonies, and apartheid; it also ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1965. Its immigration policy was revised administratively to remove much of the “stigma of racialism,” and the revision of its policy toward Aborigines to provide for greater economic, educational, and social justice helped break the old image of a “White Australia.”⁴⁵

Australian-American relations at the official level have usually been interpreted in political and military terms. Economic and cultural matters have been kept in more or less watertight compartments. The development of Australian mineral resources means that Australia has become a resources-rich power, but one determined to become “neither a quarry nor a sheikdom.”⁴⁶ Control of those resources and of the capital necessary for that development has increased the area of potential conflict between Canberra and Washington. With the growth of multinational corporations, many of them American-based, the nationalistic Australian government became very sensitive to capital inflow and takeover bids. It now asked in a new context the old socialist question, “Who owns Australia?” Was Australia in danger of becoming a sphere of American economic influence? What the Australian government was doing was to treat the American connection, and especially the ANZUS relationship, as part of the total Australian scene—political and military, economic and cultural. Mainly what the Whitlam government did was to accelerate changes that were already under consideration. Despite its concern with new Australian initiatives, few of its designs got much farther than the blueprint stage.

The Pacific islands proper, as one might call them, were merely of peripheral interest to Australia until the Second World War. War meant that the islands became important links in the supply route from California and Panama to Australia. The Curtin government, partly Fabian socialist in outlook, supported postwar decolonization. In 1944 Evatt invited the prime minister of New Zealand to a conference in Canberra, where he produced for the surprised New Zealanders the draft of the ANZAC agreement. It contained, among other provisions, one for the setting up of a commission to promote the welfare and advancement of native peoples in the Pacific. The effective outcome was the South Pacific Commission, which came into being in 1948. Australia, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States were the original members, all of them controlling island colonies in the Pacific.

The initiative in organizing the South Pacific Commission was Australian, and Australia provided the largest contribution to its budget. But interest in it waned after the change of government in 1949. “…it lacked not sympathy but positive drive from Australia…. Australia conscientiously if not over-enthusiastically, played its part.”⁴⁷ It played no part in the decolonization of Pacific territories except for Papua–New Guinea. After the change of government in 1972, Australia became more actively interested in welfare policies of the South Pacific Commission and, along with New Zealand, increased its voluntary contributions to its budget. In 1971 the Liberal government had accepted an invitation to participate in the South Pacific Forum, and Whitlam strongly supported closer cooperation between Australia and the new independent and fully self-governing island states. But, despite an increasing Australian interest in the islands and their welfare, they remain low in the priorities of Australian foreign policy. Southeast Asia, Japan, and the United States are much higher on the totem pole.

To sum up, since 1919 the major change in Australian foreign policy has been the shift from dependence, almost total dependence, on the United Kingdom in matters of defense and foreign policy to a close relation with the United States. It would be an exaggeration to speak of an attempt to develop a new umbilical cord to Washington to replace the old one to London. What the Whitlam government attempted to do was to introduce a new perspective into relations with Washington and to avoid the shadow cast by the United States. Australia ceased to be a British outpost: relations with Britain were conceived of as “being based less on kin and more on kind.”⁴⁸ Satellites belonged to the heavens but not to the Australian earth. Australia became a robust middle power with new contacts in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The danger in its new outlook lay in an overexpansion of Australian diplomatic interests and commitments and in the possibility of confusing gestures about foreign policy with its substance, in mistaking image making with international reality. The element of continuity is very strong.

1	T. B. Millar, Australia’s Foreign Policy (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1968), 7.
2	W. M. Hughes, Politics and Potentates (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1950), 241n.; cf. W. Farmer Whyte, William Morris Hughes (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1957), 393.
3	J. R. Poynter, “The Yo-yo Variations,” Historical Studies (Melbourne: University of Melbourne), 14 (April 1970), 231–250.
4	See W. Hudson, “The Yo-yo Variations: A Comment,” Historical Studies, 14 (October 1970), 424–429.
5	W. G. K. Duncan (ed.), Australian Foreign Policy (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1938), 51.
6	Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1939–41 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1952), I, p. 551.
7	Hudson, op. cit., 429.
8	Jay Pierrepont Moffat, “Diaries,” cited by Norman Harper (ed.), Australia and the United States (Melbourne: Nelson, 1971), 97–98, 104–108.
9	F. Alexander, Australia since Federation (Melbourne: Nelson, 1967), 171–173.
10	Lionel Wigmore, The Japanese Thrust (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1957), 177.
11	Dixon Wecter, “The Aussie and the Yank,” Atlantic Monthly, 177 (May 1946), 52.
12	John Oliver Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder (London: Cape, 1964). Part IV discusses the experiences of American troops in Brisbane during the war from the point of view of a Negro soldier.
13	Norman Harper and David Sissons, Australia and the United Nations (New York: Manhattan Publishing Co., 1959), 47–60; Paul Hasluck, “Australia and the Formation of the United Nations: Some Personal Reminiscences,” Journal and Proceedings, Royal Australian Historical Society, 40 (1954), 133–178.
14	C. Hartley Grattan, The United States and the Southwest Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 202.
15	Percy Spender, Exercises in Diplomacy (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969), 120; Alan Watt, The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy, 1938–65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 179–181; T. B. Millar (ed.), Australian Foreign Minister: The Diaries of R. G. Casey, 1951–60 (London: Collins, 1972), 18 (hereinafter cited as Casey, Diaries). Casey suggests that agreement about the treaty was finalized just before General Douglas MacArthur reached Washington after being relieved of his command on April 11.
16	Spender, op. cit., 133; Watt, op. cit., 176–185; Casey, Diaries, 18.
17	Text in Department of External Affairs, Current Notes, 22 (Canberra, 1951) 243–245.
18	Gordon Greenwood and Norman Harper (eds.), Australia in World Affairs, 1950–55 (Melbourne: AIIA and Cheshire, 1957), 162–163 (hereafter cited as Australia in World Affairs). Casey commented that ANZUS was the surest means of interesting the Americans more and more in the Southeast Asian mainland, Diaries, 95.
19	Australia in World Affairs, 163; Watt, op. cit., 178, 180; Selwyn Lloyd complained to Casey of the “stubborn exclusion” of the United Kingdom. Casey, Diaries, 108.
20	Casey said at the conference that “the real purpose of the Treaty is to present a concerted front against aggressive Communism, which presents the free world with immediate problems of security. Our own defense policy is directed to this dominant purpose.” Diaries, 185.
21	Current Notes, 34 (June 1963), 5; New York Times, June 4, 1963.
22	Norman Harper, “Australia and the United States,” Australia in World Affairs, 1961–65 (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1967), 340–342.
23	Alan Watt, Vietnam: An Australian Analysis (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1968), 112–117; Australia in World Affairs, 1961–65, pp. 353–356.
24	H. Holt, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House of Representatives), vol. 57, p. 1857 (hereafter cited as C.P.D. [H of R.]); Clark Clifford, “A Viet-Nam Reappraisal,” Foreign Affairs, 47 (July 1969), 607.
25	See Henry Albinski, Politics and Foreign Policy in Australia: The Impact of Vietnam and Conscription (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970); Norman Harper, in Australia in World Affairs, 1961–65 358–60; and ibid., 1966–70 (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1974), 291–297, 303–307.
26	Trevor E. Reese, Australia, New Zealand and the United States: A Survey of International Relations, 1941–68 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 332.
27	Norman Harper, “Australia and Suez,” in Australia in World Affairs, 1950–55, PP. 341–357; Casey, Diaries, 249–257.
28	Australia in World Affairs, 1956–60, p. 234.
29	Hobart Mercury, March 24, 1968.
30	J. G. Crawford and Nancy Anderson in Australia in World Affairs, 1961–65, p. 223, and ibid., 1966–70, pp. 129 et seq.
31	Heinz Arndt, “Foreign Investment,” in Australia in World Affairs, 1966–70, pp. 145–59; also D. T. Brash, American Investment in Australian Industry (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966).
32	See Norman Harper in Australia in World Affairs, 1956–60, p. 195; ibid., 1961–65, p. 231; and ibid., 1966–70, pp. 313–314. For a discussion of the impact of American culture in Australia, see Grahame Johnston, “Literature”; Wal Cherry, “Theatre”; Robin Boyd, “Mass Communications”; and John Buchan, “Architecture”; in Norman Harper (ed.), Pacific Orbit (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1968), 123–167.
33	Sydney Morning Herald, December 6, 1972.
34	Richard Nixon, A New Strategy for Peace, Report to the Congress of the United States, February 18, 1970, pp. 6, 55–56.
35	Bruce Grant, Crisis of Loyalty (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972), 17; Hedley Bull, “From Evatt to Whitlam,” Evatt Memorial Lecture, August 9, 1973 (mimeographed).
36	Australian Foreign Affairs Record, 44 (1973), 199 (hereafter cited as A.F.A.R.).
37	Ibid.
38	E. G. Whitlam, “Australian Foreign Policy,” A.F.A.R., 44 (1973), 31.
39	E. G. Whitlam, August 22, 1973, C.P.D. (H. of R.), vol. 85, p. 200; Australian, July 28, 1975.
40	Whitlam, op. cit.
41	Whitlam, November 20, 1973, C.P.D. (H. of R.), vol. 87, p. 3500.
42	A.F.A.R., 45 (1974), 40; Norman Harper, “The American Alliance in the 1970s,” in J. A. C. Mackie (ed.), Australia in the New World Order (Melbourne: Nelson, 1976), 43–44.
43	Melbourne Sun, August 1, 1970.
44	Whitlam, Address to National Press Club, New York, July 30, 1973, A.F.A.R., 44(1973), 529.
45	Mackie, op. cit., 23; cf. J. A. C. Mackie, “Australian Foreign Policy from Whitlam to Fraser,” Dyason House Papers (Melbourne: AHA), August 3, 1976, pp. 1–4.
46	E. G. Whitlam, Australia’s Foreign Policy: New Directions, New Definitions, 24th Roy Milne Memorial Lecture, Brisbane, November 30, 1973 (Melbourne: AIIA, 1973), 19.
47	W. D. Forsyth, “The South Pacific Commission,” in Australia in World Affairs, 1961–65, p. 494.
48	A.F.A.R., 44(1973), 394.