A striking moment in Australia’s election campaign came when David Speers asked the prime minister and the opposition leader if they trust the president of the United States. Normally a trust-in-the-alliance question would be met with gush about shared values, one hundred years of mateship and the wonderful nature of the great and powerful friend.
This time the prime minister offered a limp vote of confidence defined by negatives: “I have no reason not to.” And the opposition leader embraced the country but wouldn’t judge its leader: “We need to have a very strong working relationship with the United States, of course we do,” he said. “We trust the United States. I don’t know the president. I’ve not met him.”
The Donald Trump trust question is the latest version of the one at the heart of the alliance: what will America do to defend Australia? It’s the same question that was posed when the alliance was being born and then formalised in a treaty, and its foundation legends were being created by Labor and the Liberals.
Start with Labor’s version. The party’s wartime leader, John Curtin, became prime minister on 7 October 1941 after a Coalition government fell on the floor of parliament. Two months later, on 7 December, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and launched its invasion of Southeast Asia. Australia faced its greatest existential threat.
Early on Saturday 27 December, in Melbourne’s Flinders Street, the editor of Australia’s great afternoon paper, the Herald, paid a visit to news editor Cecil Edwards. He brought with him the proof of an article to be published in the magazine pages — a new year’s message from John Curtin — and suggested a page one pointer. Edwards read the article and announced, “This ought to be the lead of the paper.”
Curtin’s key sentence entered history: “Without any inhibition of any kind, I make it clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links and kinship with the United Kingdom.”
Edwards, also a Reuters stringer, cabled several hundred words to the news agency in London. “Within hours we were receiving agitated reaction,” he recalled. “It was the first time in my experience that a magazine page article in an Australian newspaper became front-page news in England, and stirred breasts in Whitehall and Downing Street.”
As Edwards later wrote, Curtin’s article had been in the office for days but no one had grasped its significance. If the editor hadn’t noticed it in proof, “the most outspoken public declaration ever made by an Australian prime minister would have remained buried in the magazine pages.” Some rare days in journalism, you nearly scoop yourself.
Britain was outraged. Churchill threatened to combat Curtin by broadcasting direct to the Australian people. In Washington, Franklin Roosevelt smelled funk and called in Australia’s ambassador, Richard Casey, for a private talk, not to be reported to Canberra.
We have two versions of this White House meeting. First, from the memoir of Casey’s wife, Maie Casey: “President Roosevelt sent for Dick and told him if it was thought that this statement would ingratiate Australia with the US he assured him it would have the opposite effect. It tasted of panic and disloyalty.” Her account is echoed in W.J. Hudson’s biography of Casey, which reports Casey’s belief that Curtin’s appeal was seen in Washington “as almost treason against the major ally, Britain, as an unpleasant ditching of that ally in time of stress, as an unbecoming attempt to change horses.”
The other record of the FDR conversation, Casey’s contemporaneous note, wasn’t found until eight years after his death. “In an interview with President Roosevelt shortly afterwards,” he recorded, the president “expressed the greatest distaste about this [Curtin] statement… making it clear that he was speaking to me privately and not officially. He put me under a seal of secrecy… He said that if it was thought that such a statement as Mr Curtin had made would help Australia with the United States, he assured me it would not.”
Six months later, on 1 June 1942, Curtin’s war cabinet convened in Melbourne for talks with the new commander-in-chief, Douglas MacArthur. The US general told Curtin that America saw Australians as a bunch of bronzed Brits, tied to Britain by blood and sentiment, and that America had no particular commitment to Australia. The meeting’s minute paraphrased MacArthur:
The US was an ally whose aim was to win the war, and it had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia. Its interest in Australia was from the strategical aspect of the utility of Australia as a base from which to attack and defeat the Japanese… The commander-in-chief added that, though the American people were animated by a warm friendship for Australia, their purpose in building up forces in the Commonwealth was not so much from an interest in Australia but rather from its utility as a base from which to hit Japan. In view of the strategical importance of Australia in a war with Japan, this course of military action would probably be followed irrespective of the American relationship to the people who might be occupying Australia.
The historian who unearthed this archival gem, Peter Edwards, comments: “From what MacArthur said, it would not have mattered whether Australians had brown or black or purple skins; whether they were Muslim or pagan or Zoroastrian by religion; or whether they spoke thirty-eight different languages, all incomprehensible to American ears. The Australian landmass offered a geographically convenient base for American forces, and that was all that mattered to American policy-makers.”
Australia and the United States have done a lot together since Curtin gave Australia a realpolitik reading of one great-and-powerful friend versus another, and MacArthur returned the realist favour. Some lessons from the Labor creation story:
- panic softly, so as not to alarm friends
- traditional links (alliance and past wars) help but may not be decisive
- Australia’s geography is a huge asset: the only nation with its own continent offers much of strategic value
- leaders’ beliefs matter but they are driven by the forces they confront.
Roosevelt’s distaste for Curtin’s “panic and disloyalty” didn’t outweigh the larger demands of war against Japan and the need for Australia’s geography; Curtin’s description of what was needed was accurate.
Donald Trump is more interested in transactions than traditions; that’s okay, because Australia brings a lot to the transaction table (vital minerals, Mr President?). And Curtin showed Australia has a pragmatic ability to ditch “traditional links” when it has to deal.
The Liberal creation story of the alliance offers similar lessons. Today’s questions about trusting Trump recall prime minister Robert Menzies’s fear that the ANZUS defence treaty might be “a superstructure on a foundation of jelly.”
If Trump has Canberra quivering, that dread of a shaky base has been around since the moment the ANZUS treaty was signed in 1951. As with Curtin’s turn away from Britain in 1941, Australia’s feat in achieving the ANZUS treaty was driven by circumstance and happenstance and a lot of pushing. The perspiration and inspiration didn’t come from Menzies. The intellectual creativity and diplomatic wheeling-dealing came from external affairs minister Percy Spender, who described his leader as sceptical, verging on negative, about the quest for a Pacific pact.
Spender seized the moment to get ANZUS in 1950–51 when the Korean war meant the United States desperately needed Australian agreement on what Menzies called a “soft” peace treaty with Japan. Though pessimistic about the chances, Menzies was present at ANZUS’s creation and exploited the deal with a master politician’s gusto.
“If I were asked which was the best single step that had been taken in the time of my government,” Menzies told his farewell press conference in January 1966, “I think I would say the ANZUS treaty because the ANZUS treaty has made the United States of America not perhaps technically, but in substance our ally. In other words, we have a species of alliance. Don’t hold me to it as a technical expression — we have a species of alliance with the United States. And placed as we are in the world, that is tremendously important.”
The duality is striking: from jelly to “best single step.” Yet the way Menzies phrased that farewell thought — “species of alliance” — hints that reservations lingered.
Spender laid out the quest for a Pacific pact in his first foreign policy statement to parliament on 9 March 1950. (Menzies had led the Coalition to power in December 1949.) His statement on “international affairs” is a foundational document of Australian foreign policy.
In his memoirs, Spender wrote that Menzies was “unenthusiastic” and “poured cold water” on the efforts to create a Pacific pact. The Menzies view was that Australia didn’t need a formal alliance because the United States was “already overwhelmingly friendly to us and Australia could rely on her.” In both London and Ottawa, Spender said, Menzies used the “superstructure on a foundation of jelly” description.
The jelly perspective from the Washington is given by secretary of state Dean Acheson, who signed the ANZUS treaty in 1951 and gave president Harry Truman this account of the first ANZUS council with Australia and New Zealand in 1952: “It seemed to me that both countries suffered from a paucity of knowledge of what was going on and faulty appreciation of current situations. They felt remote, uninformed and worried by the unknown.”
Menzies’s scepticism was based on long experience of American diplomatic reluctance and outright resistance from the US military. From 1936 to 1950, in the words of diplomat Alan Watt, all Australian political parties “advocated negotiation of some form of Pacific security pact as an essential element in Australian foreign policy.” Menzies’s scepticism about the Americans also went to the core of his personality and beliefs — his Britishness.
Menzies was uncomfortable with the shift from a family relationship with Britain to a contract with Washington. And his eventual passion for ANZUS was tinged with disappointment at the decline of Britain’s role.
For international relations scholar Coral Bell, Australia’s “over-long national adolescence as part of the British Raj” produced a model of a family commitment that was comprehensive and automatic and didn’t need to be defined in writing. ANZUS marked the move to the world of contract: “It was not comprehensive, never covering economic relationships, nor even all security problems (though at one stage Australian policy-makers tried hard to interpret it as doing so). It wasn’t automatic, but required an act of political will — a choice — at a specific time by both parties.”
The “political will” element of ANZUS is where the central question sits because the pact offers no promise of automatic military support. The single “action” sentence makes up all of Article III of the treaty: “The Parties will consult together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific.”
Any potential foe should be unsure about what the “consult” promise would deliver in a crisis, just as Australian strategists have spent decades teasing out its potential.
Menzies used ANZUS-as-contract language in a parliamentary debate on the meaning of the alliance in April 1964. “There is a contract between Australia and America,” he said. “It is a contract based on the utmost goodwill, the utmost good faith and unqualified friendship. Each of us will stand by it.”
Those were his final words in a speech dancing eloquently around Washington’s decree that ANZUS wouldn’t cover Australian troops sent to Malaysia during its confrontation with Indonesia 1963–66. Malaysia was certainly in “the Pacific area” covered by ANZUS; but the United States wasn’t going to read into the contract an obligation to help Australia (and Britain) fight Indonesia.
Menzies, the great lawyer, had to invoke the spirit of the pact rather than the letter of the treaty. What ultimately mattered, he said, was the “high-level acceptance of responsibility” by America in embracing ANZUS: “It is not for us to assume that any great ally of ours will avoid that [responsibility] any more than we will avoid it. It is a great mistake to talk dogmatically of what the United States of America will do.”
The treaty wording is unchanged, yet the nature of the pact has evolved and grown (and shed New Zealand). And the alliance still asks the questions implicit in Menzies’s totemic phrase about the “great and powerful friend”: How great? How powerful? How friendly?
Donald Trump shakes all aspects of the totem. He is the personification of Menzies’s thought about never assuming dogmatically what the US will do. How will he read the terms of the contract?
With an unpredictable occupant in the White House, Canberra suffers another Dean Acheson moment — feeling “remote, uninformed and worried by the unknown.” •
