Unholy Fury (5 page)

These were seismic jolts to the nation's sense of psychological and physical security. Although the conservative governments of Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon all in their own way wrestled with the dilemmas thrown up by this situation, and groped for a solution, they were unable to break free of the Cold War baggage, and the habits and beliefs that had served them so well in the previous decades. They wanted to believe that the United States' obligations to Australia still held, that the ANZUS treaty remained holy writ. They clung on tenaciously even as the world transformed around them, trying to make an era of rapid change fit the established pattern.
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But the times required a fresh approach. Whitlam, unburdened by the failed policies of the past, had the personality and the intellect to undertake the task. Resetting the coordinates of the American alliance towards a more self-reliant posture was a central part of this process and was therefore bound to stir passions and unsettle emotions. Whitlam stated clearly and unequivocally that it was time to view Britain and the United States as ‘foreign' countries, to be treated no differently from China, Japan or Indonesia. To a political establishment long used to cherishing special ties with the power centres in London and Washington, Whitlam's message bordered on the heretical.

In the days following his election win in December 1972, the new Labor prime minister had issued special instructions for diplomats abroad, saying that he wanted a ‘more mature, less adulatory' relationship with the United States, ‘not one of mindless agreement or friendship simply for friendship's sake'.
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The problem was that his redefinition of the alliance appeared to jettison some of the language and lore about the relationship which had been carefully crafted over the preceding two decades. Unlike some of his predecessors, Whitlam did not treat the alliance as the Holy Grail of Australian foreign policy; he did not seek the ‘coronation' of his prime ministership in an ‘ostentatious embrace' on the South Lawn of the White House.
He did not pine for ceremony. Indeed he believed it ‘should be possible without formal planning for [the] Prime Minister to stop for [a] chat at [the] White House'.
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That vision of easy informality would prove difficult to attract a sympathetic ear in Washington, as would his view that ‘America needs us as much as we need America'.
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That particular concept of mutual reassurance was not one shared by Nixon or Kissinger.

And yet so much of the current debate on the US-Australia alliance remains obsessed with the cosmetics of the relationship. Critics and pundits routinely cross-check whether a prime minister is invited to stay in Blair House, the stately residence across from the White House reserved for visiting VIPs; how much time each leader spends in the Oval Office; how many touches of informality or spontaneity are provided; whether the visit extends to the president's private retreat, be it Camp David or a Texan ranch. The trappings of a prime minister's visit to Washington are often cast as the ultimate barometer of where Australia sits in the US pantheon of friends and allies. But the parsing of presidential protocol and the process of sifting through visit schedules to divine the ‘appropriate' level of ‘access' only scratches the surface of how the alliance is conducted. It fails to ask how or whether such treatment leads to a greater Australian say in the making of US policy affecting its vital national interests. And it tends to cloud judgement about the challenges that the alliance will confront in the future and the circumstances in which Australia may or may not be able to depend on US support.

In taking a more forensic approach, this book makes no apology for examining the power centres that shape international networks of exchange, or for elevating the central importance of the political and diplomatic dimension of modern Australian history. In the same spirit as Christopher Clark's recent study of the events that contributed to the outbreak of World War I, this book is ‘saturated with agency'.
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Its key players—presidents and prime ministers, foreign ministers and secretaries of state, ambassadors and diplomats, national security advisers and a whole host of officials in the Australian and American bureaucracy—drive the story. Their outlooks and objectives, their judgements and actions, their words and decisions, were those which
had real consequences for how the two countries managed the end of the Cold War in East Asia. The rich sources used here, drawn from US, Australian and British archives, speak for themselves in this regard and offer an unparalleled insight into the workings of the alliance in its most critical period to that time or since.

 

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Reflecting on Labor's long period in the political wilderness during the height of the Cold War, Gough Whitlam came to the conclusion that his party was caught on the wrong side of a major fault line in Australian politics. From 1949 to 1972, he recalled, ‘Support for the American alliance, formalised by the ANZUS treaty, became a loyalty test; loyalty to the United States became the test of loyalty itself, as for many previous generations loyalty to Britain and the British empire had been'.
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Debates over Australia's foreign and defence policy in these years were inevitably filtered through two very powerful lenses: the perceived threat from Chinese communism and the status of the United States as a ‘great and powerful' friend. Gradually, the test of statesmanship became not so much the reception afforded Australian leaders in the stately corridors of power in London's Whitehall, but the scale and size of the welcome mat laid out on the south lawn of the White House. Ceremonies in Washington DC and speeches during Coral Sea Week celebrations, as the social critic Donald Horne remarked, came to be ‘closely watched as auguries of the soundness of the alliance'.
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Horne was referring to the particularly strong hold of World War II on Australians' collective memory of the relationship with
the United States. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the rites and rituals associated with remembering the battles of the Pacific war became powerful tools in shaping a narrative for the alliance. They provided not only the commemorative glue for the fledgling strategic partnership, but also a rhetoric that regularly invoked America's world power and the two nations' common cause in the Asia-Pacific. Above all, the memory of wartime endeavour furnished the belief amongst the Australian political community that the United States underwrote Australia's security during a dangerous time in a vulnerable part of the world. The battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 had witnessed the first time Australian and US forces fought alongside each other in that war, and victory there was a vital strategic blow to Japan's southwards advance. The memory of these wartime engagements and achievements was sustained largely by the Australian-American Association, founded in 1936 and run primarily by the non-Labor political elite.
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Such occasions were usually marked by the visit of a prominent US military figure and US navy vessels, and featured balls, speeches and talks between officials. This was the Cold War pageantry of the US-Australian alliance.

The Americans did not have to work too hard to cultivate this memory forged in the crucible of battle. Before he visited Australia in May 1963 for talks with Menzies and the federal Cabinet, the US under secretary of state for political affairs, W Averell Harriman, was told that the Australians

 

both personally and in their press, are almost embarrassingly pro-American. They will probably … bring out time and again the fact of their gratitude to the United States for what they consider our single-handed actions in saving Australia from Japanese invasion. You will hear many references to Makassar Straits, the Battle of Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. Since these almost always derive from Australian origin. it is usually inappropriate for an American to initiate reference to them. However you must be prepared to respond with proper understanding of their emotional feelings about these military actions.
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The enduring resonance of the Coral Sea anniversary as a lodestone for Australia's American embrace can also be seen in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam war, when Prime Minister Harold Holt hailed it as a tale of allied triumph over armed aggression: ‘Let us now re-affirm our resolution that there can be no surrender to aggression, and that by our common efforts and sacrifice, peace and stability can and must be restored in South Vietnam'.
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This was the muscular alliance—the invocation of battles past and present where ‘comrades in arms' stood shoulder to shoulder in defence of the ‘free world'.

The Labor Party's political agony during the Cold War cut all the more deeply because of the belief that its credentials for alliance management rested squarely on these seemingly impregnable wartime foundations. John Curtin's leadership during the war, especially his ‘look to America' statement of late December 1941 and the working relationship he established with General Douglas MacArthur, were heralded by party leaders—then and since—as the moment when Labor not only proved its true mettle in defending the country, but also took the initiative in forming the essence of the US alliance. His actions in so doing were seen to bury the doubts about Labor's capacity to handle defence and foreign policy that had plagued the party since the 1916–17 conscription crises. Whitlam himself drew on this lesson many times in his speeches and statements, at the same time recalling his own service alongside US personnel in the Pacific War. Curtin's call for US assistance—at a time when the British navy proved incapable of defending Australia—was readily woven into a tale of heroic national leadership, in which the Irish-Catholic Labor leader abruptly and dramatically dispensed with British ties and turned to the more powerful Pacific ally. Thus, so the myth runs, did Curtin found the US relationship that had come to be the unquestioned first principle of postwar Australian foreign policy.
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‘VERY MUCH ALONE IN THE PACIFIC'

But the saga of US-Australian wartime cooperation tended to ignore the friction between the two governments during the war, particularly as attention turned to framing the peace. When,
for example, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt and the Chinese leader Jiang Jieshi met in Cairo in December 1943 to discuss the future shape of the Pacific, Curtin and his external affairs minister, HV Evatt, only read about their deliberations in the newspapers. The agitation over the failure to consult Australia about its regional security took on a new dimension when the United States arbitrarily announced its intention to maintain its wartime naval base on Manus Island, which was part of Australia's mandated territory. In response, Evatt and his New Zealand counterpart unveiled the ‘ANZAC' agreement of January 1944, in which they attempted to deny any country—and they had America primarily in mind—the right to retain bases on Australian or New Zealand territory after the war. This decision, taken without any prior consultation with Washington or London, was a blatant attempt to frustrate US ambitions. The two countries also declared their joint responsibility for regional zones of defence in the South West and South Pacific. But the Americans and indeed the British gave short shrift to what they perceived as antipodean truculence and presumption, and refused to attend the conference which Evatt had called to discuss the implementation of the agreement. By the end of that year Evatt was going to great lengths to convince the US minister in Canberra that Australia had no desire to ‘act behind the back of the United States'. But he also confessed that he was tired of ‘being constantly brushed off' by US policy makers when setting forth his views on regional security. Ever fearful of a resurgent Japan, Evatt confided that Australia ‘felt very much alone' in the Pacific.
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The fear of isolation and strategic vulnerability had been a feature of Australia's world outlook since the late nineteenth century, and it drove several previous efforts, notably by Alfred Deakin in 1909 and Joseph Lyons in 1937, to seek some kind of lasting security arrangement with their US cousins across the Pacific. In the four years following the end of World War II, those efforts were redoubled, as both Evatt and Chifley worked feverishly to try to establish a defence pact with the United States. The war had shown them that only US power was sufficient to provide for Australia's protection. But these Australian attempts clashed with US traditions
and preoccupations—firstly the United States' historical reluctance to become involved in ‘entangling alliances' and secondly its overwhelming focus on the emerging Cold War in Europe. Officials in Washington saw no reason to take on extra commitments in an area of the world where they had few interests and discerned no threat. They could not understand Australia's lingering suspicion of Japan, particularly since it was now under US control. In mid 1946 Evatt travelled to Washington to seek a mutual defence alliance but was coldly rebuffed, Truman telling him that ‘a strict treaty would be difficult on the grounds that US obligations would be extended to an area far outside their present hemispherical sphere of influence, meaning North and Latin America'.
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In other words, he was not prepared to contravene America's Monroe Doctrine—the policy which since its enunciation in 1823 had been the cornerstone of US statecraft, and which not only opposed interference in the Western Hemisphere by outside powers, but cautioned the United States against becoming too deeply involved in European and world affairs.

Evatt was not a man easily deterred, and he next tried to secure an ‘informal statement of policy' from the White House—in effect a presidential decree of support covering the defence of Australia and New Zealand—but that too was rejected. Finally he attempted to secure the reciprocal use of bases in the Pacific, a move designed to warn potential enemies of at least the tacit cooperation of the US and the British Commonwealth in the region, but it likewise failed to bear fruit. Indeed at the end of 1946 the United States withdrew from the Manus Island base altogether. As the Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson observed, it was not of ‘significant importance to the US'.
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And in the words of historian Neville Meaney, that move signalled the ‘abandonment of any plans for a regional defence arrangement'.
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All of Australia's efforts had thus proved futile. In 1947 Evatt was again frustrated by US moves which he felt would concede a ‘soft peace' for Japan in order to gain their support against Soviet expansionism in north-east Asia. The two countries seemed to be at cross purposes: as US policy makers worried about the prospect of a third world war, Australians seemed to be stuck refighting old battles from the second. They could not countenance the argument
that the global struggle against communism justified the appeasement of Japan.
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