Australia, the United States, and the Cold War, 1945?51: From V-J Day to ANZUS (original) (raw)
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The limits of Empire: Australia, eastern appeasement and the drift to war in the Pacific, 1937–41
2018
Despite Australia’s regional security interests being intimately involved in the Pacific War, scholarship often portrays the nation as uninvolved in preparations for the imminent regional conflict. Rather, Australia ‘suffered from a chronic lack of self-reliance’, looking instinctively to the British Empire and the security it afforded. This article proposes that in the years 1937–41, the Australian government – first under Joseph Lyons and then Robert Menzies – recognised both the immediacy of the Japanese threat and the limitations of imperial defence plans and accordingly responded with a concerted policy for the coming regional conflict. The principal focus of this article is Australia’s position towards Japan and the implied pragmatic appraisal by Australia of the strategic value of diplomacy in maintaining regional stability. In the context of this growing assertiveness, this article also considers broader tensions in the Australian–British relationship, tensions centred on each nation’s respective and divergent position towards Japan. In this way, this article is more than just an examination of strategic appraisals, rearmament and diplomacy. It seeks to comment on Australian geopolitics, its relations with great powers, and the challenge of balancing national interests.
Friends in High Places: Australian-American Diplomatic Relations Since 1945
Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2008
The relationship with the United States has in many ways been Australia's most important external tie since the second World War. It has been a source of diplomatic support, of security, of trade, intelligence and technology. It has also provided a measure of Australian capacities, standards and achievements, a whetstone for the sharpening of Australian self-assertion and been a source of irritation with American ascendancy. The fact that America has loomed so large in most discussions of Australian interests, and the ways in which they should be pursued, has of course had much more to do with America's global role than with any inadequacy or bias in Australian policy. It is, perhaps, a sign of a certain intellectual parochialism that Australians have so rarely appreciated that relations with the US are also central to many nations in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East, not to mention the Western hemisphere. But the dualism of Australian attitudes to the US, the mixture of dependence and resentment, or cooperation and self-assertion, has much deeper roots than considerations of politics or trade or even ofnationalsecurity, importantthough theseare. IthastodowithnothinglessthantheformsoftheAustralian
Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2008
Writing to R.G. Casey, the Australian representative in Washington, five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the newly-incumbent Labor Prime Minister, John Curtin, candidly expressed his fears about Australia's strategic vulnerability and, as a consequence, its desperate need for massive American military aid.' Furthermore, with Japan's rapid conquest of the east Asian mainland, it was evident that Australia could no longer depend upon British naval protection as its primary defence against external attack.*This urgent and unprecedented national crisis prompted Curtin in late 1941 to issue his famous address which averred Australia's immediate military reliance, indeed dependence, upon the United States. His sentiment that 'Australia looks to America, free of any of the pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United K i n g d~m ' ,~ may be regarded as heralding a turning-point in Australian diplomacy and the commencement of an uneasy military alliance with the United state^.^ Though, as Glen St J. Barclay comments: The idea of counting on the United States for support in the event of Japanese aggrcssion was nothing new to Australian thinking. It had been entertained since the turn of the c e n t u~y .~ Already in December 1941 each nation's perceptions of the nature and extent of this expedient military alliance were essentially divergent. Roger J. Bell argues that the interests of the two Pacific Allied powers were 'often complementary, though not wholly identical'.6 Australia wanted a vigilant aggressive protector to halt the apparently imminent invasion by a long-hated and long-anticipated enemy. The US, as Eisenhower assessed on 17 December 1941, needed Australia primarily for its strategic location and resources.' Bell continues that: The Australian government pursued a series of clearly discernible policy initiatives towards Washington. These were often modified or abandoned because of overt or covert American opposition.n
Histories of war – and particularly global wars – are often narratives on a grand scale, focusing on a grand strategy. In these narratives, smaller players and their more modest strategies are often overshadowed. This paper explores such a strategy in Australia’s shift from appeasing Japan to deterring it and efforts to secure US military commitment to the Pacific. Since the establishment of a legation in Washington in 1940, Australia was attempting to convince US policymakers of overlapping US-Australian security interests in East and Southeast Asia. However, by early-1941, with this strategy proving ineffective and the Japanese army moving through Southern Indochina, threatening Malaya, Thailand and the Netherlands East Indies, a different approach was needed. This paper argues that a coordinated economic policy with the US, rather than military, offered Australia the greatest opportunity to tie its vital interests in Pacific affairs with those of the US. This paper will examine the 1941 rescindment of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, the US concurrent economic embargo against Japan, and the parameters of Australia’s willingness to cooperate, speaking to how the nation saw itself in relation to the great powers and their grand war strategies.
Resolving the Anzac Dilemma Australian Foreign Policy, 1942-1952
In this era of US-China superpower rivalry, some analysts observe that Australia will eventually be forced to reconsider its choice of partner. It may be informative to consider how Australia resolved this dilemma when America overtook Britain as the dominant regional and world power in the mid-twentieth century. Whilst military strength and cultural links were critical in Australia"s search for security, in the 1940s the Australian government undertook radical economic alterations that impacted upon its relationships. These fundamental changes and their impacts are regularly absent in studies of Australian foreign policy. In the crises of both 1941 and 1950, Australia looked for US support which was forthcoming. However, whilst when the Japanese crisis ebbed in 1942-43, Australia resumed its traditional imperial links, the stabilisation of the Korean War did not see the same outcome. After a decade of Australian economic development, non-Anglo immigration, the decline in Anglo...
Despite Australia's national interests being directly involved in the Pacific War, existing scholarly portrayals range from a nation pitifully underprepared and entirely dependent upon Britain for protection and policy direction, to a "Great Betrayal" of Australia by Britain. This paper will challenge such perceptions, examining Britain's inadequate strategic planning for the Pacific and the manner in which this growing insecurity encouraged Australia to pursue greater assertiveness in policy making. Developments between 1937-41 are examined with a particular reference to the strategic and diplomatic measures adopted by Australia in a bid to better position its interests and prepare for an imminent regional conflict. Namely, these measures were a balancing of rearmament and a conciliatory position towards an increasingly belligerent Japan. This paper speaks to the theme of Entangled Histories through its examination of Australia's position as an Anglocentric nation and member of the British Empire, whose immediate strategic interests lay in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper will consider the challenges implicit in attempts to maintain national interests when these interests exist in two vastly different geopolitical spheres. In this way, this paper contributes to a broader understanding of the factors shaping the practice of Australian foreign policy.