Tag Archive for: ANZUS at 70

ANZUS at 70: Remembering September 11—a prime minister looks back

This post is an excerpt from the new ASPI publication ANZUS at 70: the past, present and future of the alliance, released today. Over the next few weeks, The Strategist will be publishing a selection of chapters from the book.

I first met President George W Bush on 10 September 2001. I had travelled to Washington to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the ANZUS Treaty. As part of that observance, I was presented with the ship’s bell of USS Canberra. The US Navy warship was named in honour of HMAS Canberra, which was lost in the Battle of Savo Island while protecting American marines landing on Guadalcanal.

What followed the attack the next day on September 11 was to demonstrate the strength of the relationship between our two countries. Twenty years after that day, and 70 years after the signing of the security treaty, this is an important occasion to reflect on the alliance’s history, future and enduring significance. This is a relationship forged in the Indo-Pacific, strengthened during the War on Terror, and permanently part of our future security.

Being in Washington at the time of those attacks had a powerful effect on me. Earlier that day, I had walked past many of Washington’s memorials on what was a beautiful autumn morning. Just one hour before the attacks commenced, I walked past the Lincoln Memorial; the statue’s clenched fist represented that president’s resolve to see through a war for freedom. Later that day, I wrote the following letter to President Bush:

Dear Mr President. The Australian Government and people share the sense of horror experienced by your nation at today’s catastrophic events and the appalling loss of life. I feel the tragedy even more keenly being here in Washington at the moment.

In the face of an attack of this magnitude, words are always inadequate in conveying sympathy and support. You can however be assured of Australia’s resolute solidarity with the American people at this most tragic time.

My personal thoughts and prayers are very much with those left bereaved by these despicable attacks upon the American people and the American nation.

On the morning of the attack, I had a scheduled news conference just after 9 am to speak about my visit and other domestic issues of the day. Before the conference, my media adviser calmly informed me a plane had hit one of the towers at the World Trade Center. He returned 10 minutes later, banging on my door to tell me another plane had hit the other tower. While the news conference was in progress, the third plane was driven into the Pentagon. After the news conference had finished, we pulled back the curtains to see smoke rising above Washington.

The sheer scale of the death and destruction was extraordinary, especially during peacetime. The surprise attack had killed more people than Pearl Harbor, though this time the targets were innocent civilians. Being in the US, I shared and observed the shock, disbelief and anger of the American people. That day changed the psychology of the United States profoundly.

Despite having the most powerful military the world has ever known, Americans have long felt vulnerable. They worry about being friendless and alone. The day after the attack, Janette and I, accompanied by Australia’s then ambassador to the US, Michael Thawley, his wife and our security detail, sat in an empty public gallery of the US House of Representatives. We attended to convey the sympathy and support of the Australian people. The speaker drew attention to my presence, and I was deeply moved to receive a standing ovation. It was clear that Australia stood by the US and that we would assist in the retaliation against those responsible.

September 11 had been an attack on the American way of life and, because of our shared values, it was also therefore an attack on our way of life. Before departing Andrews Air Force Base near Washington to return to Australia, I promised that ‘Australia would provide all support that might be requested of us by the United States in relation to any action that might be taken.’ Being in Washington when the attacks occurred led to my immediate commitment to offer support to the President. On the journey back to Australia, Alexander Downer and I agreed that, subject to cabinet approval, the ANZUS Treaty should be invoked.

The attacks on America’s commercial heart and its capital clearly constituted an attack upon the metropolitan territory of the US within the meaning of articles IV and V of the ANZUS Treaty. More than that, our commitment was a statement of friendship and solidarity—an expression that America and Australia stand together in a common cause. As I said in my address to parliament after my return to Australia:

If that treaty means anything, if our debt as a nation to the people of the United States in the darkest days of World War II means anything, if the comradeship, the friendship and the common bonds of democracy and a belief in liberty, fraternity and justice mean anything, it means that the ANZUS Treaty applies and that the ANZUS Treaty is properly invoked.

The alliance isn’t based on the ANZUS Treaty alone, or aimed against any other countries. It’s based firmly on a shared history and world view. This results in us having similar values and interests. In the past, this has been demonstrated by the numerous occasions when we have fought alongside each other, from World War I to Afghanistan. Now it’s most evident in issues relating to technology, human rights and our commitment to the stability of the region.

Before arriving in Washington, I believed that because of the end of the Cold War there was a danger the alliance might in time be taken for granted. My four hours with President Bush on 10 September were the beginning of my friendship with him, as well as many other partnerships that would develop following September 11. Although our military and intelligence services have long had close associations, the campaigns we have fought alongside each other undoubtedly strengthened those bonds.

Our forces are now more accustomed to working together and are more interoperable than before. The posting of Australian service men and women to the Pentagon and various other joint commands has reinforced this. So, too, our longstanding intelligence-sharing agreements, along with our privileged access and contribution to those arrangements, have so far prevented further attacks on our countries. The trust and respect which have developed between our national security professionals, as a result of working so closely together, particularly over the past 20 years, complements the text of the ANZUS Treaty.

While much of our joint efforts in recent years has been focused on the Middle East, ANZUS has always been centred on the Indo-Pacific. With renewed interest and competition in the region, it’s worth remembering HMAS Canberra’s service and sacrifice at Guadalcanal which was honoured on 10 September 2001. That campaign, led by the US, followed by the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway, marked the Allies’ successful transition to offensive operations against Japan.

In time, that would win the war in the Pacific and secure the safety of Australia.

The alliance endures because of our shared history, values and interests. Seventy years after the signing of the ANZUS Treaty, it continues to be a force for stability in the region.

ANZUS at 70: Menzies, Spender and the creation of ANZUS

This post is an excerpt from the new ASPI publication ANZUS at 70: the past, present and future of the alliance, released on 18 August. Over the next few weeks, The Strategist will be publishing a selection of chapters from the book.

Before, during and immediately after World War II, Percy Spender was a close observer of, and sometimes minor participant in, regional and global geopolitics, noting especially Britain’s declining power and influence and the emergence of a powerful US from its traditional isolationism. As his biographer, David Lowe, has demonstrated, Spender saw, much earlier than most Australians, that Australia’s future lay in the Pacific, based on a strong defence relationship with the US and close relations with the non-communist nations of postcolonial Asia. Despite Spender’s often fractious relationship with his party and his obvious leadership aspirations, Robert Menzies appointed him as foreign minister when the Liberals came to office in 1949.

Early in his short but highly significant term as Minister for External Affairs, Spender made it clear that his personal mission was to achieve a security treaty with the US. He had already taken a prominent role in forming what became the Colombo Plan (known for a time as the ‘Spender plan’).

Spender hoped for a relationship that would include a security guarantee similar to the NATO model and the greatest possible access to strategic policymakers in Washington. Many small nations aspired to such a relationship with the world’s greatest superpower, but Washington was reluctant to offer that level of support for nations that couldn’t offer strategic assets in return. As MacArthur had told Curtin, holding similar democratic values or a ‘consanguinity of race’ wasn’t enough.

Moreover, Spender’s own leader was less than wholeheartedly supportive. Menzies, who pronounced himself ‘British to the bootstraps’, was influenced by the opposition of the British governments led by Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill to the concept of Australia, New Zealand and the US signing a treaty to which the UK wasn’t a partner. Menzies also feared that any American guarantee would be limited to the administration that granted it, so that any agreement might be ‘a superstructure on a foundation of jelly’.

Spender’s educational and professional background and his tenacity in argument were similar to HV Evatt’s—they were alumni of the same high school and law school—but their approaches had a crucial difference. Evatt placed great faith in international law, especially the UN Charter, of which he had been an architect. Spender, like Menzies and their cabinet colleagues (including a future foreign minister, Paul Hasluck), took the view that what mattered in the world was power. In the emerging Cold War, as in the recent world war, the fate of small nations depended on the attitudes and interactions of the great powers.

Spender’s ability to impress Washington depended on both long observation and agile opportunism. While Menzies was incommunicado on a tour to the UK and the US, Spender ensured that Australia announced a commitment of troops to the Korean War shortly before Britain announced its own, demonstrating that Australia was acting on its own assessment of Pacific geopolitics, not merely following London’s lead.

When the Chinese entered the Korean War soon afterwards, the Americans realised that they needed respectable partners to support a ‘soft’ peace treaty with Japan, of which many Australians were still highly suspicious. At the time Britain, with American support, was pressing Australia to commit forces to the Middle East in the event of a widely feared Third World War against the Soviet Union. Spender asserted that Australia would make such a commitment only if its ‘back door’ were secured by the Americans. With the aid of the chief American negotiator, John Foster Dulles, that argument won the day.

Menzies kept himself at some distance from much of Spender’s negotiations, but the urbane Melbourne barrister readily accepted the benefits of his assertive colleague, later declaring the negotiation of ANZUS as one of the principal achievements of his 16-year term as Prime Minister.

The Australians didn’t get a security guarantee as strong as that of the NATO alliance. Nor was their access to strategic policymakers as great as they had hoped, largely because the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no intention of sharing their detailed plans with a minor ally. After a short but highly significant term as foreign minister, Spender spent the next seven years as ambassador in Washington, constantly seeking to put more ‘flesh on the bones’ of the alliance. He was less successful than he had hoped, partly because the atmosphere in Washington was less favourable and partly because his cabinet colleagues objected to his inclination to act as if he were still the foreign minister, rather than an ambassador acting on his government’s instructions.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Menzies government’s public statements and confidential diplomacy placed more emphasis on the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, of which both the US and the UK were members, than they did on ANZUS. After the armistice in Korea, Australia’s only military commitments were successful counterinsurgency campaigns in the Malayan Emergency and the Indonesian Confrontation, both of which were fought alongside British and Commonwealth forces but with minimal involvement or support from the US. Not until combat troops were committed to Vietnam in 1965 did Australians fight in an American-led campaign in which Britain wasn’t involved.

Spender’s success in gaining the prize sought by many nations was achieved by long preparation, skilful leadership of a young but effective diplomatic service, close attention to political developments in both Australia and the US, and the perspicacity and courage to seize any opportunity to press his case. The different experiences of Curtin in the early 1940s and Spender in the early 1950s demonstrated that the creation of an enduring Australian–American security relationship required a sympathetic domestic environment in both countries as well as favourable alignments in global and regional geopolitics.

For the next 70 years, supporters of the alliance worked to keep those elements in line. The continued existence of the alliance shows that those efforts have generally succeeded. But, in the early 1970s, when dramatic realignments occurred simultaneously in domestic politics in Canberra and Washington and in regional and global geopolitics, the alliance came perilously close to a terminal breakdown.

ANZUS at 70: Curtin, MacArthur and the Pacific War

This post is an excerpt from the new ASPI publication ANZUS at 70: the past, present and future of the alliance, released on 18 August. Over the next few weeks, The Strategist will be publishing a selection of chapters from the book.

When was the Australian–American alliance founded, and by whom? Over the past eight decades, those questions have often been debated, usually with an eye to current politics and partisan loyalties. This chapter and the next address the two main rivals for a foundation narrative—the assertion that the alliance was established by Prime Minister John Curtin and General Douglas MacArthur in 1942, and Percy Spender’s claim to be ‘the onlie begetter’ in 1950–51.

In the decades after World War II, Australians were often told that the alliance was founded by Curtin and MacArthur. The origin, the story went, was Curtin’s statement in late December 1941 that ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’ That realignment was cemented in the succeeding weeks, as the Japanese cut through the British and Dutch territories to Australia’s north.

The fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, described by Curtin as an ‘inexcusable betrayal’ of Australia by Britain, not only condemned tens of thousands of Australian and allied troops to the ordeal of prisoner-of-war camps but also destroyed a generation of British and Australian strategy. Darwin and other Australian towns were bombed, and Australians feared an imminent Japanese invasion.

Then, the foundational narrative continues, MacArthur arrived in Australia as the commander-in-chief of all allied forces, including Australia’s, in the Southwest Pacific. MacArthur put his arm around Curtin’s shoulder and said that the two men would ‘see this thing through together … you take care of the rear and I will handle the front.’

And in due course MacArthur started his victorious advance northwards from headquarters in Melbourne, then Brisbane, and imminent defeat was turned into ultimate victory.

At the time, and for decades afterwards, Curtin’s supporters said his wartime leadership, especially the relationship with MacArthur, made him the saviour of Australia. His critics alleged that he had made an unconscionable ‘surrender of [Australian] sovereignty’ to the vainglorious general, and therefore to the emerging global superpower.

Historians have pointed to many flaws in the Curtin–MacArthur narrative. The statement that ‘Australia looks to America’ didn’t appear in a major strategic statement but in a New Year message, destined for the magazine pages of an afternoon newspaper, until an alert editor was struck by its tone and made it a front-page story around the world.

Much less well publicised was MacArthur’s statement to Curtin in a private meeting on 1 June 1942, hours after three Japanese midget submarines had entered Sydney Harbour. In lamenting the failure of Australia’s efforts to gain more military support from either Britain or the US, MacArthur said that Australia was linked to Britain and the Empire by ties of ‘blood, sentiment and allegiance to the Crown’. The US, by contrast, was interested in Australia solely as a ‘base from which to hit Japan’, and not out of any relationship with the Australian people. MacArthur wasn’t only telling Australia that the presence of American forces was merely temporary, and that it should look to Britain for ongoing support; he was also using Curtin’s own phrases to deliver this lesson in realpolitik.

In the following years, to the surprise and consternation of some of his colleagues, Curtin ‘wrapped himself in the Union Jack’, making effusive statements about Australia’s links with Britain and the Empire while demonstrating much less enthusiasm for the Americans. His private strategic and diplomatic discussions were aimed at developing close links with Britain’s political and military leaders, while seeking not to offend MacArthur and the Americans. On his only overseas voyage as prime minister, he tried to resurrect the idea, beloved of earlier conservative prime ministers, of machinery to coordinate the foreign policy of the entire Empire/Commonwealth. He even arranged the appointment of a royal duke as governor-general, defending that move as one of many measures to improve strategic links with Britain.

Curtin’s efforts in that direction were complicated by the ability of his foreign minister, HV Evatt, to infuriate both British and American leaders. In style and substance, Australia often appeared to have two external policies, personified by Curtin and Evatt. When accepting appointment as Australia’s ambassador in Washington, Owen Dixon insisted that he would report to Curtin, not Evatt. Australia succeeded in having the Pacific War Council (the body that would supposedly shape allied strategy) located in Washington rather than London, but Dixon’s reports made it clear that, while Dixon himself was well regarded, President Franklin Roosevelt had no intention of allowing Australia, or any ally other than Britain, to contribute substantially to strategic decision-making.

In the immediate postwar years, Curtin’s successor, Ben Chifley, maintained close and friendly relations with a like-minded Labour government in Britain while keeping some distance from the US. Conservatives criticised Chifley’s government for failing to persuade the Americans to maintain their wartime naval base on Manus Island, but that simply didn’t fit into the US Navy’s postwar strategy. More broadly, the efforts of Evatt and his departmental head, John Burton, to establish an independent position between the US and the Soviet Union in the incipient Cold War did nothing to win American favour.

In later decades, references to the Curtin–MacArthur relationship often reflected the conflicting demands of party loyalty and support for the alliance amid changes in domestic and global politics. Never was that better illustrated than in the 1980s, when Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Defence Minister Kim Beazley skilfully used the Curtin narrative as a way to demonstrate, both to anti-American elements in the Labor Party and to conservative critics of Labor’s commitment to the alliance, that it was both possible and desirable for a Labor government to endorse a close Australian–American defence relationship.

The Curtin–MacArthur relationship reflected a genuine Australian desire to establish a close strategic partnership with the US, but it didn’t lead to a lasting relationship. As MacArthur pointed out with brutal clarity, the American view was that Australia was (to borrow a phrase from a later period in the relationship) a ‘convenient piece of real estate’, a base from which to begin the counterattack against Japan, but not a long-term strategic partner. While some Americans, including MacArthur himself on one occasion, found it useful to speak of the ‘consanguinity of race’ between Americans and Australians in the struggle against an Asian enemy (with characteristic disregard for those in both forces who weren’t of Caucasian descent), the Americans felt no sense of obligation to secure the future of fellow white men.

Nevertheless, as his most recent biographer, John Edwards, has shown, Curtin’s management of the MacArthur relationship was astute and far-sighted. He supported the public manifestations of the close relationship with MacArthur while suppressing his resentment at their strategic disagreements, their personal tensions and MacArthur’s vainglorious posturing.

In so doing, he made it possible for later leaders, of all political persuasions on both sides of the Pacific, to speak of the two nations standing side by side in every major war of the 20th and 21st centuries, and even of ‘a century of mateship’. The accusation of a ‘surrender of sovereignty’ was one that the leader of a small and highly exposed ally of an emerging superpower simply had to swallow.

ANZUS at 70: The Great White Fleet and the beginnings of the security partnership

This post is an excerpt from the new ASPI publication ANZUS at 70: the past, present and future of the alliance, released on 18 August. Over the next few weeks, The Strategist will be publishing a selection of chapters from the book.

In the first years of the 20th century, shared perceptions of the potential threat from Japan began to bring Australia and America together. President Theodore Roosevelt’s dispatch of 16 battleships of the US Navy on a round-the-world cruise in December 1907 resulted in one of the greatest events of Australia’s first decade as a federation. In part intended as a deterrent against a Japan aggrieved by the treatment of Japanese immigrants in the US’s west coast states, the Great White Fleet’s demonstration of the rise of American power was one that couldn’t be missed—and certainly wasn’t, by at least one Australian politician.

The enthusiastic invitation by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin for the fleet to visit Australia was itself significant in many ways. An early initiative in Australian foreign policy, it was regarded with concern by British authorities, and with reason. This was a time when Australian protests about the inadequacy of the British Empire’s defences in the Western Pacific were mounting, largely—but not only—because of the fear of Japan. The extraordinary reception given to the American ships when they arrived in August 1908 was of little comfort to imperial authorities. More than half a million Sydneysiders were there to watch the fleet’s entry to Port Jackson—well over five out of six of the city’s population!

Other observers drew an obvious, if premature, conclusion. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of Germany’s naval expansion, which was intended as a direct challenge to British naval supremacy, and whose East Asiatic Squadron was an additional threat to maritime Australia in the Western Pacific, later asserted that ‘one of the results of that American voyage was to make Australia lean strongly from England towards America.’ The truth, as Deakin well understood, was that Australia wanted both great powers on its side.

The visit demonstrated not only the relative weakness of the local Royal Navy squadron of nine mostly small and ageing cruisers, but the inadequacy of the young Commonwealth’s naval forces. The only active Australian units—two aged gunboats—were ‘prudently kept in the background’. William Creswell, the Director of the Commonwealth Naval Forces, worried that a turn to America for protection against Japan would become a substitute for Australian naval development. Over the long term, Creswell’s fears of Australian underinvestment in defence would frequently be justified, but in the short term AW Jose’s assessment was more accurate: ‘The moral that Australians drew was that they simply must have a fleet of their own.’

The British took the point as well. The 1909 Imperial Conference produced a formula for Australian naval development acceptable to both the Admiralty and Australia, resolving a problem that had defied solution for several decades. The Fleet Unit that arrived in Sydney in October 1913 would prove to be one of the most timely strategic investments Australia ever made. Plans to use the new navy to foster relations with the US were soon in train. The dispatch of the battle cruiser Australia to represent Australia at the opening of the Panama Canal and then visit San Francisco for the city’s 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition was halted only by the onset of war.

Australian naval units worked with those of the US Navy in several theatres after the American entry into World War I in 1917, most notably as components of the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea. This meant the Australian Navy’s emerging leaders gained first-hand experience of American capabilities—as well as making friends in the US Navy. A future Chief of Naval Staff, the then Commodore GF Hyde, pointed out to the Australian Defence Council as early as 1923 that, if the British were unable to dispatch a fleet to the Pacific, a completed and operational facility at Singapore would provide the US Navy with the fleet base in the Western Pacific that it couldn’t create for itself under the restrictions of the Washington treaties regime.

The US Navy would make another visit en masse to Australia in 1925, when no less than 56 ships, including 11 battleships, visited east coast ports. This, still the largest peacetime visit by a naval force in our history, had as much of a Japanese dimension as that of 1908, although it was less of a demonstration than a test of capability. The Americans, conscious that a conflict with Japan would require their fleet to deploy across the vast distances of the Pacific, used the Australian deployment to increase their understanding of the logistic requirements involved—while avoiding the increase in tensions with Japan that a similar expedition to the Philippines or East Asia would have inevitably created. The interest in and enthusiasm for the American ships and their crews displayed by the Australian population weren’t quite on the mammoth scale of 1908, but they remained remarkable—and were greatly appreciated.

Thus, when, as commander of the Australian Squadron, Hyde took the newly completed heavy cruiser Australia to the US on her delivery voyage to Australia from the UK in 1928, the American welcome was equally warm. In Boston, the US Navy sought support from the locals specifically because the hospitality shown in 1925 to American sailors had been so great and ‘had left a remarkable impression on the visiting seamen’. The Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet, Admiral Henry A Wiley, one of the flag officers in the 1925 fleet visit, made a point of bringing his flagship to Boston to host the Australia. It was no coincidence that Wiley had commanded the battleship Wyoming in the Grand Fleet in 1918—the Wyoming had exchanged many visits and social events with the light cruiser Sydney.

It would take another global war for the growing links of friendship to help establish the operational partnerships that would be vital to winning the war in the Pacific and in the ‘limited conflicts’ that would follow with the onset of the Cold War. But there can be no doubt that the 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet began a relationship that would be and remains a vital component of Australia’s national security strategy.

ANZUS at 70: A crucial security alliance examined in detail

This post is adapted from the introduction to ANZUS at 70: the past, present and future of the alliance, released on 18 August. Over the coming weeks, The Strategist will be publishing a selection of chapters from this new ASPI book.

The ANZUS Treaty was signed on 1 September 1951 in San Francisco. It was the product of energetic Australian lobbying to secure a formal US commitment to Australian and New Zealand security. At the time, the shape of Asian security after World War II was still developing.

To examine this crucial relationship in detail, ASPI has produced a book, ANZUS at 70, that explores the past, present and future of the alliance relationship, drawing on a wide range of authors with deep professional interest in the alliance. Edited by long-time journalist and former executive editor of The Strategist Patrick Walters, it provides lively and comprehensible analysis of key historical points in the life of the treaty and of the broader Australia–US relationship, which traces its defence origins back to before World War I.

The treaty was a response to the strategic circumstances of the day. It came to pass at a time when Canberra worried that a ‘soft’ peace treaty with Japan might one day allow a return of a militarised regime to threaten the region. That fear quickly receded in the face of a more immediate challenge.

On 25 June 1950, North Korea crossed the 38th parallel to attack South Korea. Australia quickly committed forces to the conflict. Towards the end of 1950, China entered the war with an estimated 200,000 troops. Prime Minister Robert Menzies wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs in January 1951 that ‘the real and deadly and present question is whether inside the next two years’ we would be able to resist ‘a vast Communist aggression against one manifestation of which we are actually now fighting in Korea’.

The ANZUS treaty is brief, comprising a short preamble and 11 articles. Article III states: ‘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.’ Article IV says: ‘Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.’

Seventy years on, in 2021, the Indo‑Pacific region faces real, deadly and present questions about defence and security. What’s remarkable about ANZUS is that it continues to be the central pillar of Australian defence and security policy and a key part of the US’s ‘hub and spokes’ alliance system globally. (As we shall see in these pages, New Zealand took a different course on ANZUS but remains an ally of Australia and a close friend of the US.)

Alliances more typically are short‑lived arrangements designed to meet specific threats, but the adaptability of ANZUS is such that the alliance cooperation it supports changes to meet new demands, to support new opportunities for cooperation and, indeed, to promote wider security interests in the region.

ANZUS today encompasses much more than defence and intelligence cooperation. Newer areas of collaboration include work on cybersecurity, space, supply chains, industrial production, rare earths, emerging science and technology areas such as quantum computing, climate change and wider engagement with countries and institutions beyond ANZUS’s initial scope or intention.

In 2021, ANZUS acts as a core component of wider and deeper relations between Australia and the US. This study aims to show the range of those ties, to understand the many and varied challenges we face today and to understand how ANZUS might be shaped to meet future events. ASPI is grateful to the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia for the financial support that enabled this volume to be produced. As with all our work, ASPI, and the various authors in this study, remain independent in their editorial judgements.