Posted on 09/10/2001 3:44:39 PM PDT by Dundee
Polishing the rusty shield
Fifty years ago the ANZUS treaty was signed. What has it meant for Australia? And does the treaty still have a place in today's world? Gay Alcorn reports on the strategic threats the US believes still underpin the old alliance.
The American official thinks about Australia for a moment and compares the Awssies to a girl on a first date. She'd be better off not going "all the way", he says. Holding something back may keep the boy interested, he says it with smirk, but there's a kernel of seriousness to it.
The United States is that colossus of a superpower economically, culturally and militarily, and the rest of the world competes for its attention. If Australia is ever reliable and, more recently, understanding of America's radical agenda for missile defences and global warming, the 360-kilogram gorilla doesn't have to worry about it too much. As the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said when explaining why he never visited Australia while he was in office: "You gave me no trouble."
For 50 years, ANZUS has been a sleepy alliance, largely irrelevant to America's ideological struggle with communism through the Cold War. Since then, it's been Europe, the Middle East and North-East Asia - China, Japan and North and South Korea - that have absorbed its attention as it spreads its gospel of democracy and free trade around the globe.
As for the Pacific Pact, Harry Truman's administration only agreed to the slim, 11-article treaty because Australia insisted on it in exchange for supporting what it saw as a "soft" peace deal with postwar Japan. The alliance fitted in with America's anti-communist network, but there was no enemy on which to focus, and no great power in South-East Asia to trouble the US.
When it was signed in San Francisco in 1951, Australian newspapers noted glumly that a visit by Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister to the same city attracted several hundred onlookers and the debut of ANZUS only about 70. It has been thus ever since.
"What's ANZUS?" jokes James Lindsay, a foreign affairs adviser in the Clinton administration and now an analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington. But Lindsay repeats the words used by the foreign policy establishment of all sides of politics when he says the alliance is now the ballast for a network of military and intelligence links that may not be glamorous, but have behind-the-scenes value.
"If you look at Asia, the one country with which America has the greatest affinity, that would be Australia, by dint of common language, common cultural heritage and common values. And you gave us Paul Hogan, what more could we ask for?"{Dundee personal note: Sorry about that. Ditto Rupert Murdock. But we did give the world Elle, so that makes everything alright.}
Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, says the alliance "is as solid as a rock and continues to be as important to the United States as any alliance we have". The alliance's critics scoff at what they see as platitudes, and question why the US would bother honouring a minor player with no enemies with a pledge of protection, no matter how vague.
Ted Galen Carpenter, from the libertarian Cato Institute, dismisses ANZUS as a "chicken soup" alliance - "it doesn't cure the common cold but it doesn't do any harm". Intelligence and military links would flourish without ANZUS, he says, and nostalgia for past battles in which Americans fought alongside diggers was hardly justification for a formal defence treaty.
Washington is not abuzz about the ANZUS anniversary, nor is it sprucing itself up for John Howard's trip (during his last sojourn in 1999, The New York Times headlined its article, "The Other Prime Minister's Visit", juxtaposing it with intense interest in the Israeli PM's trip). Before Howard even arrived in Washington, the Los Angeles Times called him "John Hunt" in an editorial.
Last week, Washington was in a tizz over the visit of Mexican President Vincente Fox. Laura Bush was daring in a hot pink and red number, and Martha Sahugun de Fox wore 10cm heels. It was "like a family gathering", said Bush, who broke into Spanish to emphasise that his top foreign policy interest is Mexico. Fox surprised all when he suggested that another Cold War-era defence pact, cementing military ties between the US and Latin America, should be scrapped.
There are no plans to scrap ANZUS, but it, too, is changing. Both ANZUS boosters and detractors say the alliance drifted when the Cold War ended. Now, it was becoming more complex, and of greater interest to the Americans. The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has said that Australia "merits a priority from the standpoint of the United States". And the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, raised eyebrows during his confirmation hearing in the Senate when he said the US would let Australia "take the lead" on Indonesian policy.
Australia has always craved America's attention, most recently through its push for a bilateral free trade agreement, which Washington, at least for now, has rebuffed. But that there are signs that Bush may want Australia to take a more robust regional role - so long as it goes along with US interests. But there is near consensus from analysts that the risks will all be Australia's.
The reason is Bush's focus on Asia as the global region of most instability, and a relationship with China that is entirely in flux. There is the uneasy truce between South Korea and North Korea. There is Indonesia threatening to disintegrate. There is China's ambition to reunite Taiwan with the mainland and Bush's pledge to do "whatever it takes" to defend Taiwan. There is the view that Clinton was too complacent about China's emergence. Bush promptly swapped the Clinton labelling of China "strategic partner" to "strategic competitor".
The premise underpinning US foreign policy is to maintain its pre-eminence in the world and, that means an intense focus on Asia.
What does that mean for Australia? Kurt Campbell, a Pentagon official in the Clinton administration, has suggested that the US should deepen links with Australia with a permanent base for its troops, a proposal that Australia resists. "Asians are about to learn that the flip side of indifference is intensity," Campbell wrote recently. "And greater attention means higher expectations of friends and probably lower thresholds for nonsense from competitors and problem States (Japan in the former category, China and North Korea in the latter)."
Rumsfeld is overseeing the biggest review of the military since the Cold War with the intention of shifting troops from Europe to Asia, in contrast to the Clinton view that about 100,000 troops should be maintained in both areas. Regional powers are nervous because more troops would be seen as having one purpose - to keep an eye on China.
Linked to the Asian focus is the Administration's dedication, some say obsession, with its plans to develop missile defences, designed to shoot warheads out of the sky before they reach US shores. The US says a defence shield would protect against attack from "rogue" nations such as Iraq or North Korea, but China sees its potential to neutralise its small arsenal. The risk is that China may step up its missile program rapidly in response to the shield, which would cause India and Pakistan to do the same, which would increase, rather than alleviate, tensions.
Key Administration figures are hard-liners on China. In a secret defence paper after the fall of communism, Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Defence Secretary, and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who was then defence secretary, wrote that the overarching strategic purpose of the US should be "to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power". They were thinking of China.
If China feels encircled by a missile defence shield and a build-up of US troops in Asia, where does it leave Australia, or the other allies that the US expects to take on a greater regional role? And the Administration has said that if the US went to war against China, the alliance would mean that Australian troops would be there.
"For us, you guys could be collateral damage," says James Lindsay. "And this could be a problem. I would imagine that Canberra will feel itself under pressure if this Administration breaks a lot of the crockery as it proceeds with missile defence."
Sandy Berger agrees that if the hardliners prevail against the moderates, "it puts [US allies] in an unnecessarily difficult spot. Australia's relationship with China is a complicated one, it has its own dynamic, and on the other hand Australia is a very close ally with the United States and I don't think it wants to be placed in a crossfire here. I think we could be on a fast track to a train wreck."
Not just Indians to the Yankee chiefs
The ANZUS treaty has been something of a Magic Pudding in Australian defence circles since it was signed 50 years ago - needing careful guarding, but a cut-and-come-again and turn-it-around-to-change-the-flavour sort of alliance.
What Australia's defence and foreign policy communities now expect from the alliance is vastly different from the pay-off seen by the Menzies government when it was signed in September 1951.
That was after tumultuous events in Asia had abruptly ended the glow of World War II victory in the Pacific, and Australia once more felt isolated on the far side of the world.
Early postwar ideas of the Allies enforcing a "hard" peace on Japan had been dumped by the Americans. Emperor Hirohito remained on the throne, Japanese industry was making munitions for the Korean War, and Japan's "self-defence" forces were being formed.
ANZUS (along with a United States-Philippines security treaty) was the consolation prize or insurance policy for allies that had been directly attacked by Japan. A week after ANZUS was signed in San Francisco, the wartime allies (minus the Soviet Union) signed a "soft" peace treaty with Japan.
Within a couple of years, communist insurgency in Malaya and Indochina led to the "domino theory" and fears of the "downward thrust" of Chinese communism.
Fifty years later Australia is urging Japan to send troops to work with our own as peacekeepers in Timor, the scene of bitter fighting between the two countries in World War II and take-off point for air raids on Darwin.
Communism is dead in South-East Asia outside Indochina, and while China's superpower ambitions are a longer-term concern and Kim Il-sung's son keeps the North Korean threat alive, Australian policy-makers are keen to avoid ever having to make a choice between the US and China.
In between, Australia has moved from one kind of imperial dependency to a more self-reliant strategic posture, but may now be moving back to a new kind of patronage.
When ANZUS was signed, Australia had already made the mental jump from Britain to the US - at the end of 1941. By the 1960s Australian defence orders shifted to the US and Canberra intensified efforts to pull US forces into Asian theatres by getting in early with its own deployments.
The intelligence relationship, built on shared signals intelligence in World War II and ASIO's coup with the Petrov defections, intensified with use of Australian bases in the new world of spy satellites. After renewed jitters in the Whitlam years, America's trust in Labor was restored by Bob Hawke, with his early crackdown on KGB activity and refusal to follow NZ down the anti-nuclear track. Bill Hayden, as foreign minister, tried to redefine ANZUS as a regional pact rather than a global one to avoid the expectation of Australia being drawn into conflicts in which it had little immediate national interest. His failure was emphasised by Hawke's commitment to the Gulf War.
The Howard Government has increased stress on "coalition operations", well away from Australia's approaches. Interoperability with increasingly high-tech US forces has become more demanding. The extension of US power into space is being watched closely in Canberra, which sees our own forces being supplied with real-time intelligence and guidance from US space systems.
As the Australian National University's Desmond Ball recently pointed out, Canberra defence planners no longer stress the defence guarantees in ANZUS but the access it allows to American intelligence and technology.
Doubts among Australian strategic analysts about ANZUS now centre not so much on America's reliability as our ally, but more about Washington's judgment and its expectations of us.
Last month, the visiting US Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, said it was unlikely Australia would not see an interest in any regional conflict involving the US, and that "great events in our time" would not take place without some Australian participation. Some read into those comments an assumption that Australia will always join an American fight.
In addition, the attractions of American economic and cultural paradigms are seen by some critics, such as the University of NSW's Stephen Fitzgerald, as drawing Canberra away from a policy balance between the US and Asia.
A return, almost, to an imperial relationship in which one source of military, trade, financial and cultural power predominates in a world as borderless as the British Empire used to be to its subjects.
Hamish McDonald
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