BARACK OBAMA’s visit to Australia next month will be an occasion for mutual backslapping over the United States–Australia security alliance as it approaches its seventieth anniversary. It should also be an occasion for Australians to ask a question often left ambiguous or unanswered in discussions about the alliance: How far could Australia rely on the United States if it was attacked?
The question has been given new relevance by the publication of The Irregulars by British journalist-author Jennet Conant, a riveting account of British efforts in the early years of the second world war to subvert American isolationism and neutrality and to draw the United States into the war on the British side. Conant’s primary focus is on British diplomats and spies in Washington, notably the RAF officer and writer Roald Dahl, carrying out Churchill’s orders to shift US public opinion sufficiently to allow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to supply beleaguered allied forces with the ships and planes and munitions they needed to halt Hitler’s advance. It is an extraordinary story of the shenanigans (including sexual shenanigans) of Dahl, William Stephenson, Isaiah Berlin, Ian Fleming, Leslie Howard, Noel Coward and others as they mounted their intelligence operations for Churchill.
Conant does not focus primarily on US neutrality and Roosevelt’s struggle with the America First movement to win Congressional support for the Lend Lease program under which the British and their allies eventually acquired American arms. But her account reveals how difficult prevailing US attitudes made it for FDR to support the British – even when, by 1941, German submarines were repeatedly attacking American ships. It was not until September 1941 that FDR ordered the US navy to attack German and Italian warships, and most provisions of the neutrality acts were repealed in November after the sinking of the US destroyer Reuben James a month earlier. But it was only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that United States finally abandoned neutrality in December 1941. Only then did the United States truly became the arsenal of democracy and the mighty warrior power without whom the war against Hitler and Japan would be been even longer and bloodier.
It seems prudent to assess the reliability of the United States as an Australian ally at least partly against the background of its historical attraction to neutrality and isolationism and the second world war Lend Lease program (and the Cash and Carry program which it replaced). And it’s important to remember that the ANZUS treaty of September 1951 commits each signatory only to respond to an armed attack in the Pacific by acting to meet “the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.”
How far Australia could depend on US help if attacked would obviously depend partly on the circumstances at the time and partly on the prevailing tendency in US global policy. As Walter Russell Mead showed in Special Providence US global policy has always emerged from collisions and debates between Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian foreign policy traditions. Each places a different emphasis on the value of interventionist and active foreign policy as against the need to safeguard democracy and prosperity at home.
It is salutary to note that the US passed its first neutrality act in 1794. The legislation made it illegal for the US to wage war against a country with which it was at peace. Subsequent neutrality acts were passed in 1817, 1838, 1935, 1936, 1937 and 1939. Most of them refined prohibitions and limitations on trade, loans and credit for “belligerents.” No US neutrality act distinguished between aggressors and victims; all combatants were simply “belligerents.” So the United States has a strong historical predisposition to neutrality and isolationism that springs from a popular desire to avoid foreign entanglements and the corrupting influence of the “old world.” In the 1930s there was a particularly strong prejudice against what Americans saw as British trickery and machinations designed to draw America into war with Hitler.
Standard historical explanations for the US neutrality legislation of the 1930s cite five main reasons for the initial reluctance to oppose Hitler. Americans thought they had no reason to enter a European conflict; they were still recovering from the Depression and believed the economic cost would be too high; the United States had pulled Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire in the first world war and did not want to be dragged into another war by what they suspected was British duplicity; the German ethnic lobby in the United States was extremely large and powerful (and created the Nazi organization, the German-American Bund, with 25,000 members including uniformed storm troopers); and the isolationist America First movement boasted 800,000 members at its peak and had as its poster boy the popular aviator and anti-semite Charles Lingbergh.
These forces were strongly and actively represented in Congress and the media. As Conant shows, they used political pressure and legislation to frustrate FDR and other leaders who recognised that vital US interests demanded that Hitler’s push for world conquest had to be defeated. Conant notes that a 1940 Gallup poll showed that only 7 per cent of Americans wanted to declare war on Germany although, paradoxically, nearly 75 per cent believed the United States was not doing enough to help England and France. In the late 1930s FDR faced immense political difficulties as he manouvered to find ways to assist Britain. Despite large Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, he and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, could not prevent the passage of the neutrality acts.
It was the 1936 act, forbadding all loans or credits to belligerents, that most troubled FDR, and it was not until November 1939 that he was able to secure passage of the 1939 act which allowed arms trade with belligerent nations on a cash and carry basis. Under Cash and Carry the president could allow sales of materials and supplies provided purchasers paid immediately in cash and arranged for transport of the goods. FDR hoped this arrangement would help Britain and France in the event of a war with Germany. The system enabled Britain to obtain equipment but quickly depleted its gold stocks and made deliveries extremely difficult.
It was not until the passage of the Lend Lease Act in March 1941 that FDR was able to sell, lend or give war materials to allied nations. While Lend Lease helped to ensure that Britain, France, China and Russia were eventually able to defeat the Axis powers with superior American ships, planes and other weapons and munitions, it was not an act of charity. The United States delivered the goods in return for loans that had to be repaid. It wasn’t until December 2006, with a final payment of US$83.3 million, that Britain finally settled debt. Moreover, as Conant points out, while delivering Lend Lease equipment to Britain the United States was simultaneously moving to ensure that US civil aviation dominated the post-war world. At war’s end Britain was broke and in deep debt.
WHAT DOES this history suggest about the reliability of US support for Australia in an emergency which it cannot handle alone? The good news is that, depending on US policy settings, the United States is likely to help eventually if it is convinced that Australia is the innocent victim of aggression. The bad news is that the record suggests it will exact a high price that will have to be paid for many years after victory is secured.
Australia, of course, enjoys some advantages. There is not the deep historical animus in the United States towards Australia that affected attitudes towards England in the 1930s, “special relationship” notwithstanding. Moreover, globalisation and instant communications make it far more difficult for any country to ignore events even great distances away. Australia has demonstrated its willingness (arguably an excessive willingness) to support US military interventions in Vietnam, Somalia, the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan. It was Australia which at least symbolically activated the ANZUS treaty for the first time, following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. And Australia is a reliable cash buyer of US military equipment and a major source of US investment. All of these factors tend to tie the United States closer to Australia.
On the other hand, despite the current salience of the Asia–Pacific region, Australia is not perhaps as central in the strategic world view of US foreign policy elites as are the Atlantic and western Europe. And the relative strategic superiority of the United States in the Asia–Pacific region is being gradually eroded with rise of China and India. It is not entirely fanciful to suggest that a future government in Washington might see Australia as a small fish not worth the trouble of protecting from a ravenous shark which it did not want to challenge militarily.
This, perhaps, is the horror scenario for Australia. The country comes under direct threat, perhaps direct fire, from an expansionist Asian power at a time when the United States is economically debilitated by a global financial crisis and focused on restoring its domestic prosperity. At the same time US foreign policy is dominated by Jeffersonians who hold that America should be less concerned with spreading democracy abroad than with safeguarding it at home, and by Jacksonians for whom domestic physical security and economic well-being matter more than foreign activities. Imagine, too, that a right-wing populist and isolationist administration is in power, headed by a demagogic president hostile to foreign military deployments because of heavy losses incurred in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. In this setting Australia might find it very difficult indeed to obtain more than words of concern and consolation. That was about all Churchill could get from FDR until late 1941.
Is all this too remote to be worth serious strategic consideration? Consider the memorable words of Alexis de Tocquevuille in his classic, Democracy in America, published in the 1830s when the United States wanted no part in foreign entanglements. “The Americans,” he wrote, “frequently allow themselves to be borne away, far beyond the bounds of reason, by a sudden passion or a hasty opinion and sometimes gravely commit strange absurdities.” There are numerous examples of this tendency in US religious, political and economic life, but lessons learned seem easily forgotten in the United States, and its allies cannot take their comfort for granted as they nestle beneath the eagle’s enveloping wings.
Whatever else Kevin Rudd has to say to President Obama next month he would do well to remind him of another Tocquevillian insight: “The habit of inattention must be considered as the greatest defect of the democratic character.” Battling that defect has to be the primary objective of Australian policy in Washington if the alliance is to have real cash value for Australia. •
