John Howard and Alexander Downer do Australia no favours in suggesting that to place Australia’s interests ahead of those of the United States, is proof of anti-Americanism or unsound policy. They help the nation, even less when inviting interjections from an ever-obliging US Ambassador to Australia, or from the US State Department, when questions of the Australian-American alliance arise. This emphasises the crude politics with which Howard plays national security issues, and makes it harder to have a gentlemen’s agreement to disagree when our interests conflict. And disagreements happen, even under Liberal administrations.
The whole 53-year history of the ANZUS treaty, and the 61-year history of general alliance, is littered with such disagreements. Only three years after the Anzus Treaty was signed, Eisenhower made Menzies look foolish over Suez. Menzies, got no warning that the US was about to torpedo old European imperialistic pretensions. Six years later, Kennedy coldly abandoned Australia, the Netherlands and the people of Irian Jaya in the interests of appeasing President Sukarno of Indonesia. Australian troops were soon engaged against Indonesian soldiers in Borneo as an emboldened Sukarno tried to destabilise the new Malaysian federation.
Australia promoted American escalation in Vietnam, committing its own troops even as a dispirited and diplomatically isolated US was losing appetite for the conflict. This had little to do with the US line about fighting communism: it was about encouraging a continuing American military presence in Asia, because of Australian fears that China would fill any subsequent vacuum. President Nixon did not bother to tell Billy McMahon about his secret negotiations with China, nor of his plans for his Guam doctrine, through which the US largely abandoned its commitment to the region, claiming countries had to do more to help themselves.
Malcolm Fraser shared US panic about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but received little insight into American thinking. American attitudes to its relations with India, Pakistan and China bore little relation to our short or long-term interests. Bob Hawke, who under domestic pressure, refused to participate in US missile trials, seemed not to disturb the relationship. More recently, President Clinton had to be strongly cajoled by John Howard to support Australia over East Timor.
Indeed, it is unfair to think that the US assumes that we shall passively acquiesce with their plans, placing their interests first, uncritically supporting their diplomatic or military adventures. They assume that we can define and defend our