Joseph A. Camilleri - The Australia-New Zealand-U.S. Alliance: Regional Security in the Nuclear Age

Regional Security in the Nuclear Age

Joseph A Camilleri

First published 1987 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright in Melbourne, Australia by Joseph Camilleri 1987

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

LC 87-50711

Set in Plantin by
Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd., Hong Kong

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29025-2 (hbk)

A new world order was born in the years following 1945. It was shaped by some very fundamental developments: the advent of nuclear weapons; the global leadership role of the United States; the international emergence of the Soviet Union as the second most important presence on the world political stage; the devastation and gradual eclipse of Europe; the breakdown of the anti-fascist alliance that had transcended the capitalist/communist encounter during the war years; the establishment of the United Nations with the blessings of the main political actors in the world.

These conditions at the geopolitical core facilitated the emergence of nationalist tendencies throughout Asia and Africa. The colonial system was under challenge at a time of a weakened Europe and when the ascendant powers in the world subscribed to an anti-colonial credo. Radical forces were unleashed by this challenge directed at the political, economic, and cultural power arrangements in the non-Western world.

In this setting, Australia and New Zealand were caught in the maelstrom of unfolding historical forces. Their separation from England was achieved by accommodation and compromise, and was not intended to be more than partial. Further, their predominant character as white settler societies made them appear to be remnants of the colonial era rather than examples of states that achieved national independence. Indeed, if it had not been for the settler success in substantially destroying the indigenous peoples in each country, the issue of decolonization would likely have been intertwined with racial conflict, raising the sort of issue presented in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and more menacingly South Africa, For this reason it is hardly surprising that in the early postwar years these various factors led to a semi-conscious wish by the governing elites in both Australia and New Zealand to substitute the United States for Great Britain as a kind of guarantor of regional stability and as a new type of geopolitical patron, especially in light of the belief that only the United States naval presence prevented the Japanese conquest of Australia during the war years. Such receptivity complemented the United States postwar mood, whether characterized as 'expansionist' or as a reluctant assumption of 'global responsibility'. Either formulation led the United States leadership to abandon its traditional inter-war security posture of withdrawal from geopolitics, even of isolationism.

Indeed, after World War II, isolationist pressures remained strong within the United States, and constrained the more ascendant internationalist mood. Those in control of postwar foreign policy in the United States the so-called Eastern Establishment, a bipartisan elite that can be roughly associated with the composition and outlook of the Council on Foreign Relations were preoccupied with a fear that the isolationists concentrated in heartland America (the Midwest) would prevail as they had after World War I. Behind this anxiety was the view that it was no longer feasible to enter general warfare after it had started and that Europe left on its own might not be able to sustain peace. Internationalism, then, was sensitive to the impact of nuclear weapons on patterns of warfare and, also, incorporated the understanding that it was essential to prevent, rather than react to, World War III.

At first there were divisions among American policy-makers as to whether internationalism meant a new globalism with an idealistic look involving disarmament and a strong United Nations, or whether it was more in the realist mode, gearing up for a new round of geopolitical rivalry. The story of the postwar world can be most usefully told around the unfolding triumph of the conflict-oriented, realist view of internationalism. Partly this triumph reflected the perception of the Soviet Union as a challenger in Europe and in the Middle East, and partly it expressed the anti-appeasement assessment of peace and security, a belated adjustment to the failures by the Western democracies to meet the threat posed by Hitler during the 1930s.

In the background, also, was the domestic struggle in the United States. The isolationists were anti-Communist, but also anti-United Nations. They could be mobilized behind an internationalist foreign policy much more successfully if the stress was on containing the Soviet challenge. The Cold War, with its containment doctrine, decisively beat back the threat of a post-1945 relapse into an isolationist foreign policy. More subtly, this emphasis on threat and conflict provided a pretext for an indefinite extension of the United States (and Soviet) presence in Europe and for the permanent division of Germany. Somehow, the ideological East/West encounter made even Germans realize in time that the reunification of their country was an impractical project. In this respect, the victorious countries in World War II imposed a more punitive peace in Germany than had emerged at Versailles, and yet managed to have it accepted without a nationalist or extremist backlash. In this regard, by removing the German Question from the European agenda, the victorious power may have stumbled upon a formula for regional peace and security. Of course, part of the explanation for this 'success' was the economic prosperity that was brought to Western Europe, especially to the Federal Republic of Germany. Undoubtedly helpful, as well, was the war-weariness of Europeans, and its dampening effects on German territorial ambitions. Both the Soviet Union and the United States had strong reasons to exaggerate the security threats to their interests, and the Cold War, although producing some anxious moments, did serve to legitimize their military presences on continental Europe.

Against this background of containment and ideological struggle, the formation of ANZUS and its general character as an extension of Western European security thinking was an obvious step to take for leaders in Auckland, Canberra and Washington. The bonds of ethnic identity and cultural outlook gave the alliance of these countries almost the quality of being a mini-NATO, or of 'Asian Atlanticism'. There were, of course, from the outset also enormous differences, especially the absence of any credible Soviet threat in the southern Pacific and no threat of an internal shift of allegiance through the success of domestic communist parties (as in France and Italy).

In all these respects, the rounding and development of ANZUS in the early 1950s was a natural embodiment of the security consensus and worldview that dominated, virtually without challenge, in the three countries. At least until the Vietnam War there seemed to be no serious costs for Australia and New Zealand associated with their willingness to subsume the alliance beneath the overarching mission of United States global strategy. But in the mid-1970s the postwar world came screeching to an end, and with it the easy simplifications of the bipolar organization of world political life. For more and more non-superpowers it became evident that their sovereign rights were being jeopardized by the bloc system, of which security alliances represented the main formalization. Furthermore, on the Western side, doubts about United States capabilities and wisdom as global leader began to emerge in numerous settings. French nuclear testing was a decisive source of disenchantment with United States leadership in the southern Pacific. Washington seemed basically disinterested in the anxieties provoked in Australia and New Zealand, and left its smaller allies helpless to oppose the French menace to health and serenity. Beneath these doubts were other questions about whether the drift of the nuclear arms race and the nuclear strategies of the superpowers were in any way helpful to the national interest of Australia and New Zealand.