Twenty-five centuries ago, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian soldier-historian, Thucydides, wrote that the three strongest motives for states to engage in war were ‘fear, honour and interest’.1 Athens went to war with Sparta because the growth of the latter’s power threatened the status and interests of the former. In later centuries, Thucydides’ formula influenced both the work of Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, and by the 20th century had become the philosophical basis of the realist tradition in international relations. This article examines some of the military aspects of the alliance between Australia and the United States, employing the Thucydidean Realpolitik formula that nations are motivated in their calculations by a combination of ‘fear, honour and interest’.
Fear: The Defence of Australia
The element of fear has always been a powerful factor in determining Australian security policy. The combination of a large continent and a small population in an Asia-Pacific location relatively isolated from English-speaking nations with a similar ethnic, cultural and political heritage created a sense of insecurity in Australia for much of the 20th century. As a result, Australia sought security not through isolation or neutrality, but through cooperation and alliance with greater powers, first Britain and then the United States. Australia fought as part of a coalition in both world wars alongside both the British and the Americans. The decline of British power in the Far East, signified by the Japanese offensive of 1941–42, led to Prime Minister John Curtin’s appeal for assistance from the United States. This event marked the beginning of the Australian–American security relationship, although such a relationship was not formalised until the ANZUS Treaty of 1951.
It is useful to understand how Australia viewed its strategic position in the lead-up to the ANZUS Treaty. In 1946, Australia undertook a review of its post-1945 strategic position. The Australian Chiefs of Staff drew up an appreciation of the nation’s strategic circumstances in which they stated that the choices open to Australia were policies of either isolation or cooperation. The chiefs rejected what they called the fallacy of strategic isolation because, as ‘an island continent with a small population and limited resources, [Australia] is unable to defend herself unaided against a major power’.2 They concluded that a policy of strategic isolation based on continental defence would only lead to disaster. National security policy, they argued, ‘must be built on co-operation with other nations’.3 It followed, then, that the nation’s preparations for war ‘must be such that her forces can co-operate with those of other nations [and that] overseas commitments may be necessary and in fact unavoidable in ... a future war’.4
The 1946 Appreciation outlined a clear need for Australia to conceive of its defence in alliance terms. This requirement was increased by the outbreak of the Cold War at the end of the 1940s when Soviet and Chinese communism appeared to pose a monolithic threat to the West. During the 1950s, under the Menzies Government, Australia developed a ‘forward defence’ policy aimed at keeping war and revolution as far away as possible from Australia’s shores and avoiding any repetition of the events of 1942—the only occasion when Australia’s physical security seemed imperilled.
Fear of communism led the Menzies Government to seek a long-term security relationship with the United States. In Cold War political conditions, Menzies was determined that, if revolutionary war was to threaten Asia, the business of Australian foreign policy was ‘to see that we enter it with great and powerful friends’.5 By identifying her national interests firmly with those of the United States as the guardian of the liberal West, Australia sought to underwrite ultimate guarantees of her own national security. It was against this background that Australia signed the ANZUS Treaty in 1951, formally establishing the Australian–American alliance.
Honour: 'A Fraternity of Great Mutual Advantage'
Honour has been a major factor in Australia’s approach to its relationship with the United States. In a modern sense, honour should be interpreted as a willingness by Australia to engage in the defence of common Western liberal democratic values. In 1951, when Australia, the United States and New Zealand signed the ANZUS Treaty, military personnel from all three nations were fighting as part of the United Nations Forces in Korea in defence against communist aggression. The common military effort in Korea by Australia and the United States merely confirmed a deep and honourable bond between Australian and American fighting men that had begun on the battlefields of France in World War I and had continued in the South-West Pacific during World War II.
In his postwar memoir, Australian Victories in France 1918, General Sir John Monash recalled how, at the battle of Hamel, Australian and American soldiers had become ‘blood brothers’. Monash wrote:
Among other aspects of this battle [Hamel] which was worthy of mention is the fact that it was the first occasion in the war that American troops fought in an offensive battle. The contingent ... [that] joined us acquitted themselves most gallantly and were ever after received by the Australians as blood brothers—a fraternity which operated to great mutual advantage.6
Just over two decades later, in the South-West Pacific, this ‘fraternity of mutual advantage’ was renewed as American and Australian forces fought the Japanese—this time under the leadership of an American, General Douglas MacArthur.
Despite its common cause, the Australian–American military relationship in the South-West Pacific theatre was not always a happy one. For the first two years of the campaign, Australians formed the majority of MacArthur’s ground forces; yet the United States Supreme Commander did everything in his power to keep Australian officers from commanding American formations. Senior Australian officers, many of whom had already seen combat in the Middle East, found MacArthur’s attitude perplexing. As General Robert Eichelberger, one of MacArthur’s army commanders, noted, ‘[the Australians] though they were usually too polite to say so, considered the Americans to be—at best—inexperienced theorists’.7
While this would not be the last time that Australian and American forces would have to confront professional differences, the frictions generated by variations in doctrine or operational practices were generally overcome by the exercise of goodwill and commonsense in a common cause. For the most part, there were few barriers to effective military cooperation between the armed forces of both nations. Indeed, long before the outbreak of the Cold War, US and Australian servicemen had developed a mutual respect for each other’s qualities as soldiers.
In the Korean War of 1950–53, there was a similar degree of mutual respect between Australian and American fighting formations. In October 1950, the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment (3 RAR) took part in the pursuit operation, which followed MacArthur’s victory at Inchon and the breakout from Pusan. The Australian battalion was the lead force in the attempt to link up with the US 187 Airborne Regimental Combat Team, which had been parachuted behind the retreating North Koreas to act as a blocking force.
Attacking a numerically superior force in extended line, Diggers from 3 RAR shot and bayoneted their way through the North Koreans to link up with the Americans. In the course of this action, they killed 150 of the enemy, wounded 239 and captured 200 prisoners.8 Shortly afterwards, 3 RAR was awarded a Presidential Citation for its performance at the Battle of Kapyong in April 1951. In this action, 3 RAR, A Company of the 72nd US Heavy Tank Battalion and the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, supported by New Zealand artillery and the Middlesex Battalion, halted a Chinese offensive aimed at retaking Seoul.
A decade after Korea, defence of common values saw both the United States and Australia enter operations in Vietnam. In late-April 1965, Menzies committed a battalion group to the war in Vietnam. As Menzies put it, a communist takeover of South Vietnam ‘would be a direct military threat to Australia and all the countries of South and South-East Asia’.9 The unit sent to Vietnam was the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1 RAR). Because of the light equipment scales of the Australian infantry, 1 RAR was attached to the US 173rd Airborne Brigade (Separate) and the defence of the air base at Bienhoa. The commander of the 173rd, Brigadier General ‘Butch’ Williamson, recalled that the Australians had ‘a good reputation for jungle fighting’ and that he ‘was glad to have them aboard’.10 One Australian officer found much to admire in Williamson’s ‘style and supreme confidence and battle experience’.11 He also noted, however, ‘a dangerous contempt for the guerrilla and little understanding of the Viet Cong’s objectives and how he fights.’12
In fact, no amount of mutual admiration could mask the significant professional differences between the two armies in Vietnam. Essentially, the US Army, which was trained for operations with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) on the Central European front, concentrated on operations at the battalion level and above, while Australian training and experience in counterinsurgency operations stressed the importance of operations at the battalion, platoon and even squad level. Australian Official Historian and Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) veteran, Ian McNeill, believed that these variations in national style came down to emphasis on different principles of war: concentration of force by the Americans and economy of effort by the Australians.13 These differences caused a certain amount of frustration for both coalition partners.
From mid-1966, for political and military reasons, the Australian Government increased its commitment in Vietnam to a two- (and later three-) battalion taskforce. A consequence of this escalation was that the Australian force now comprised large numbers of short-term conscript national servicemen, as well as long-term Regular Army volunteers. The 1st Australian Task Force (1 ATF) was allocated its own tactical area of responsibility in the province of Phouc Tuy under the operational control of the US Army’s II Field Force Vietnam. While US commanders were generally content to let the Australians conduct their own war in Phouc Tuy, on occasion the differences in doctrine and operational style became a source of annoyance.
During 1966 and 1967 the Australians were slowly consolidating their hold on the province and weakening the Viet Cong’s grip on the population. However, in January 1967, on a visit to 1 ATF, General Westmoreland was critical of the Australian approach, labelling it as ‘very inactive’.14 Two years later, another senior US officer, Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, a passionate believer in attrition warfare and a ‘body count’ strategy, expressed the opinion that Phouc Tuy was a ‘disaster’ because the Australians were failing to meet his daily quota of kills.15 Yet, as one senior Australian officer explained,
For the last two years the operations of the force [1 ATF] had been almost a waste of time—the enemy had been neutralised to such an extent that seeking them was like looking for a needle in a haystack.16
Coalition operations are noted for the many difficulties that they present. Churchill’s remark that ‘in working with allies it sometimes happens that they develop opinions of their own’ aptly covers the difficulties caused by differences in doctrine and techniques between the Australian and US armies in Vietnam.17 Despite occasional problems, however, the Australian–American relationship was a generally harmonious one. In his memoir, A Soldier Reports, General Westmoreland generously refers to the Australians as ‘the most thoroughly professional foreign force serving in Vietnam.’18 Indeed, he compares them with the post-Versailles German Army ‘in which even men in the ranks might have been leaders in some less capable force.’19
Interest: 'All The Way With LBJ'
In July 1966, during a speech made in the grounds of the White House, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt told his listeners that, when it came to Australia’s commitment to Vietnam, his country was ‘all the way with LBJ’. Holt’s clear intention was to indicate support for US policies in Vietnam, once again linking America’s interests with those of Australia. Yet, despite Holt’s rhetorical flourish, Australia’s troop commitment remained modest and consistent with national rather than American interests.
In the unpredictable environment of the Cold War, the nature and size of Australia’s commitment to Vietnam was commensurate with her national interest in regional stability and a prudent counter to communist aggression in South-East Asia. However, the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s illustrated how rapid changes in the international environment can alter the manner in which a nation such as Australia perceives and pursues its interests.
A statement on future US policy in Asia made by President Nixon on Guam in July 1969 is now barely remembered in the United States, but it proved to be a watershed in Australian security policy. In essence, the Nixon Doctrine announced that America’s allies in the Asia-Pacific region would need to take on the principal responsibility for their own defence.
This new and apparently restricted definition of US interests in South-East Asia had immediate implications for the ANZUS Treaty because the extent to which these new conditions applied to Australia was unclear. The interpretation placed on the Nixon Doctrine by Australian policy-makers in the two decades following the Vietnam War was that, with regard to the highly remote contingency of a ‘fundamental’ threat to Australian security, the nation could have every confidence in large-scale US support. In matters of lower-level threats, however, Australia would need to be self-reliant. While US support for Australia through ANZUS had thus become in one sense ‘conditional’, the Nixon Doctrine implied that, to gain any support, allied states, including Australia, were still required to maintain their alliance responsibilities.
The 1969 Nixon Doctrine unravelled the basic logic on which Australia’s policy of forward defence had been based. With Australia’s major ally now unlikely to commit forces to military operations in South-East Asia, the deployment of Australian forces into the region became less important. American rapprochement with China after 1970 also significantly decreased Cold War tensions in Asia, undermining the necessity for regional pacts such as SEATO, which rapidly became moribund. Without a discernible threat, but still feeling vulnerable, Australia was forced to review her strategic circumstances and developed a national security policy to meet these new and challenging conditions.
The very conditions that had undermined the rationale of forward defence now allowed Australia to pursue a national security policy of self-reliance based on a force structure designed for continental defence. The ability to pursue this policy of self-reliance and continental defence was significantly aided by the stability of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, which secured Australia’s northern approaches. In addition, Australian–American rapprochement with China and a progressive lessening of Cold War tensions around the world enabled continental defence to be sustained as the cornerstone of Australian defence policy for over two decades.
By the 1990s, however, rapid changes in the international security environment that had begun with the end of the Cold War greatly undermined continental defence. As international security again became fluid and unpredictable, recalling the 1950s, circumstances suggested that it was once more in Australia’s interests to deploy her armed forces overseas—as in East Timor in 1999. In 2001, in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks on the United States, Australia invoked the ANZUS Treaty and sent Special Air Service soldiers to the campaign against al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan. As the leading US scholar, Eliot Cohen, has recently written, ‘the partnership first sealed at the battle of Hamel has been renewed in blood through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf and Afghanistan’.20 In the case of the 2003 Iraq crisis, Australia, along with Britain, became America’s major ally—a clear indication that in important matters of international security, the national interests of Australia and the United States are seen to coincide.
Conclusion: The Future of Australian-US Defence Cooperation
Thucydides, father of the realist tradition in statecraft, wrote that ‘the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future’.21 In other words, the past will always shape the future. Australia’s military history since World War II demonstrates how Thucydides’ triangular political logic of fear, honour and interest has dictated national involvement in wars as a coalition partner of the United States. In general, even though there may not be common agreement between Canberra and Washington, there has always been a basic correlation of interests between Australia and America.
Looking back on his career, Sir Robert Menzies considered the ANZUS Treaty to be the most significant foreign policy achievement of his sixteen-year premiership. Menzies liked to characterise the treaty, and the close partnership between America and Australia that it represented, as a contract—one ‘based on the utmost goodwill, the utmost good faith and unqualified friendship. Each of us will stand by it’.22 His confidence was founded on the knowledge that liberal, democratic nations that face shared fears tend to honour common values and work to protect the same interests. As Richard Armitage, the US Deputy Secretary of State, put it in August 2003 in the wake of the war in Iraq, in words that surely would have pleased Menzies:
Australia and my nation have many shared common characteristics—history and culture, politics and demography—but I think nowhere do we have better ties that bind than in the twin pillars of perspective and action ... There will be great continuity in our cause—this cause which was forged out of the bones of our fathers and grandfathers and now of the blood of our children.23
Endnotes
1 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Crawley, ed. R. B. Strassler, The Free Press, New York, 1996, p. 43.
2 National Archives of Australia (NAA), Canberra, Item 1645/9, Series A5954/69, An Appreciation by the Chiefs of Staff on the Strategical Position of Australia, February 1946, Part 1, Introduction, paragraph 6.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 R. G. Menzies, The Measure of the Years, Cassell, Melbourne, 1970, p. 44.
6 John Monash, Australian Victories in France 1918, 2nd edn, Hutchinson, London, 1920, p. 64.
7 Robert Eichelberger, Our Jungle Road to Tokyo, Viking Press, New York, 1950, p. 29.
8 See B. O’Dowd, In Valiant Company, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 2000, pp. 11–12.
9 F. F. Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents 1939–70, vol. 2, Wren Publishing, Melbourne, 1973, p. 480.
10 Bob Breen, First to Fight: Australian Diggers, N.Z. Kiwis and US Paratroopers in Vietnam, 1965–66, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 10.
11 John Essex-Clark, Maverick Soldier: An Infantryman’s Story, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1991, p. 6.
12 Ibid.
13 Ian McNeill, ‘Australian Army Advisers: Perceptions of Enemies and Allies’, in War: Australia and Vietnam, ed. K. Maddock, Harper & Row Publishers, Sydney, 1987, p. 56.
14 Ian McNeill, To Long Tan: The Australian Army and the Vietnam War 1950–1966, The Official History of Australia’s Involvement in South-East Asian Conflicts, 1948–75, Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, Sydney, 1993, pp. 427–9.
15 Jeffrey Grey, The Australian Centenary History of Defence, Vol. I: The Australian Army, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 220.
16 Lieutenant General D. Dunstan, quoted in R. W. Cable, An Independent Command: Command and Control of the 1st Australian Task Force in Vietnam, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2000, p. 89.
17 W. S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, MacMillan, London, 1950, p. 376.
18 W. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, Da Capo Press, New York, p. 258.
19 Ibid.
20 Eliot Cohen, ‘World won’t get fooled again’, Australian, 17 February 2003.
21 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Warner, Penguin Books, London, 1972, p. 48.
22 R. G. Menzies, The Measure of the Years, Cassell, Melbourne, 1970, p. 54.
23 Richard Armitage, ‘Bound to stick together’, Weekend Australian, 16–17 August 2003.
