THE AUSTRALIA-US RELATIONSHIP: QUO VADIS? THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

At the Commando Regiment's 50th anniversary commemoration two weeks ago, the old soldiers toasted the Queen followed by the President of the United States. This was significant on two counts: first, the absence of the politically correct attempt to toast the country rather than the sovereign; second, and more important, the sense that the Queen and the President had both been thoroughly and unselfconsciously assimilated into the Australian military tradition. At that moment, in whatever part of heaven is reserved for those who were political leaders in time of war, Menzies and Curtin should have been smiling at each other. The great lesson of the past few years is how little Australia's fundamental interests, values and relationships have changed since their time. Like his great predecessors, Prime Minister Howard has recognised that Australian interests are not synonymous with Australian territory. That is why our troops have returned to the Middle East, where their forebears first deployed and shaped the ANZAC legend. Australia's involvement in the war against terror has revitalised our military links with Britain, deepened our alliance with the United States and reinforced our own significance in the region and the wider world. It has decisively ended the Whitlam era in Australia's foreign policy - running from 1972 to 1996 - when support for the American alliance mostly meant leaving trouble for the Americans to sort out while reserving the right to snipe from the sidelines. As our contributions to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomons and PNG show, Australia is shouldering its responsibilities as a member of the global western alliance and as the major western power in our own region as we did between the 1940s and the 1960s. Although all western countries have deepened their intelligence cooperation since September 11, the war on terror has made it clearer that the English speaking countries are the heart of the western alliance. At the same time, Tony Blair’s moral leadership and Britain’s substantial military effort, have demonstrated that the western alliance is more than just cover for well-intentioned American unilateralism. Unsurprisingly, the French have been sensitive to these shifts in the international order with the Interior Minister observing last week “who would have thought that…Great Britain would (again) become a leading light in the world”. For Australia, the days when American presidents confused our prime minister’s name are long past. Partly, it's the warmth between John Howard and George Bush; the near identical worldview in Canberra and Washington; and Australia's willingness to deploy combat units to the world's flashpoints; partly too, the more critics America has, the more it appreciates loyal friends. America will always mean more to Australia than the other way round. Still, while post-cold war America's stature has grown against the rest of the world, Australia's relative stature has grown too. It's now a more equal relationship with more candour, more shared endeavours and more mutual understanding. For at least half a century, America has been Australia's most important ally. As well as the democratic superpower, America has become Australia's largest trading partner and biggest source of foreign investment. Even so, the importance of Britain, as America's principal global ally, Europe's most assertive military and economic power, Australia's second largest foreign investor and fourth largest trading partner has too often been under-rated. Then there's the intellectual and cultural force field which the English language has created, the shared values, instincts and emotions which link all the English-speaking countries (including those like India and Malaysia where English is the universal second language). In a form of cultural cringe, the Australian left has sometimes embraced American symbols to undermine support for the monarchy and other British-derived Australian traditions such as judicial restraint. In a recent Quarterly Essay, former Keating speech-writer Don Watson recycled Manning Clark's metaphor of the "old dead tree" and the "young green tree" to deride conservative affinity for the mother country versus progressive feeling for America. Still, if those on the left had any meaningful sense of America as Reagan's "shining city on a hill" or any deep commitment to democratic pluralism, they would have enlisted, however reluctantly, in the war against terror and in the struggle to build a functioning civil order in Iraq. Besides, the "either/or" approach to Australia's relations with Britain and America is founded on one rather over-wrought statement that "Australia looks to America free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom" rather than Prime Minister John Curtin's considered view. Curtin's statement was a cry for help rather than a fundamental reorientation of Australia's foreign policy. In a time of mortal peril, he was happy to accept whatever assistance could be had (in addition to the 100,000 British and Indian troops alongside the Australian 8th Division in Singapore) but he was no proto-republican. He never thought there was any inconsistency, let alone incompatibility, between American military protection and the strongest possible bonds with Britain. In February 1942, at almost the same time as he and Churchill were arguing over whether the 6th and 7th divisions should go to Rangoon or Fremantle, Curtin addressed Australians as the "sons and daughters of Britishers". He rightly welcomed American soldiers to Australia as people who "speak like us, think like us and fight like us". This didn’t prevent him, in 1943, describing the British Empire as “…an instinctive association, which has been sanctified by blood, promoted by intellectual agreement…and ennobled by a higher perception of duty to the world”. In an address in London in May 1944, Curtin said: "(The cricket ground) Lord's is to Australia what it is to this country…We are helping to defend this historic city of London and those 22 yards of turf which we hope will be used time and time again so that the motherland and Australia can decide whether the six ball over is better than the eight ball over". Sir Robert Menzies is not the only other Australian prime minister who might have warmed to this allegory. In a month when the Australian Prime Minister is travelling to Washington and London (and will, duty permitting, spend some time watching cricket at Lord's) who could reasonably deny that continuity is as important as change in Australia's international relationships? In a 2001 speech to open the Magna Carta monument in Canberra, Prime Minister John Howard spoke of the values shared by the people of Britain, Australia and the United States and described September 11 as an attack on the people and values of all three countries. In a 2003 speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the Queen's coronation, John Howard asserted that the Iraq campaign was only the "latest example of Britain and Australia, along with our American friends, having stood together and taken risks together in a just cause". For 100 years, America, Britain and Australia have taken up common causes, fought the same wars and even spawned the same protest movements. Relations between the three countries have been more akin to a partnership or even brotherhood than a mere alliance. Australia never gave Britain or America a blank cheque, it's more that countries with the same values tend to have the same interests. Right now, it's understandable that opponents of the decision to invade Iraq are emotionally committed to vindicating their pre-war position. Still, as the past cannot be undone, the big question is how best to help Iraq emerge as a relatively stable, pluralist society. The sooner foreign forces leave the better, provided Iraqis can maintain their own security. Even so, the "troops out now" brigade haven't thought the issue through or don't really care about the fate of Iraq. Apart from ignoring post-war Iraq's economic growth, political pluralism and the comparative tranquility of the Shiite south and Kurdish north, "quagmire" talk could easily become self-fulfilling if it saps the resolve of democratic governments to stand by the Iraqi people. Someone radicalised by the Iraq campaign might just as easily have taken up jihad after the Afghanistan campaign or the First Gulf War. It's the nature of western societies rather than anything they've done which enraged the September 11 suicide bombers and their successors in Bali, Madrid and London. The people who daily destroy dozens of their fellow Muslims in Baghdad are unlikely to become modern metrosexuals in response to a premature Anglo- American withdrawal. Instead, they would have a secure base from which to broaden their attacks, a larger and stronger version of Afghanistan under the Taliban. A prosperous and pluralist Iraq would be the most powerful antidote to convert-or-die Islam which is why it has become the central front in the war on terror. The American, British and Australian governments understand this as, in their own ways, do the American and British oppositions. Kim Beazley understands this but, unlike Tony Blair, won't risk further dividing his own party. The day before the tube bombings, the Opposition Leader was equivocal about Australia's involvement in the war on terror, demanding that Australia get out of the Iraq "quagmire" before considering any new commitment to Afghanistan. The very next day he described the London terrorists as "subhuman filth" who must be "eliminated". Perhaps I've missed something but this looks like a classic case of willing the end but not the means. If there were no substance in the charges of isolationism and defeatism that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer recently levelled against the Australian Labor Party, they would not have provoked such a reaction. Downer was entitled to draw parallels between Labor today and the head-in-the-sand, pro-appeasement Labor Party of 1938 because the real John Curtin was far more complex than the inspiring wartime leader of Labor legend. As Paul Kelly has pointed out, there were at least two John Curtins. Curtin's evolution from pacifist to wartime statesman was also a story of personal growth from alcoholic loner to leader trying to make his party understand the bitter necessities of global conflict. The Curtin who, in November 1939, voted against the dispatch of the Second AIF may have grasped, by that time, the implacable evil of Nazism but his party had not. Curtin's triumph was to move from idealism to realism without losing his values and, in fits and starts, to take his party with him. Thusfar, there is only one Kim Beazley. The Minister responsible for the semi-pacifist "defence of Australia" doctrine is of a piece with the Opposition Leader who insisted that the Government shouldn't "overdo" any new role in Afghanistan. John Curtin didn't bring the 6th and 7th Divisions home to face a hypothetical threat and he did leave the 9th Division in the Middle East to play a decisive part in the Battle of El Alamein. Curtin took Australia's international and imperial responsibilities seriously. He understood that alliances ultimately rest on deeds not words. Although the alternative prime minister can be trusted to say the right thing about the American alliance, forced to choose between the United Nations and the United States, on current form, no doubt with eloquent regrets about the flaws of the world body, he would end up sitting firmly on the fence. By February 1940, still in opposition, Curtin declared that a future Labor government would reinforce the AIF. In June, a specially-convened Labor conference declared "indissoluble unity" with the allies and supported the dispatch of expeditionary forces. The alternative prime minister of 2005 has more in common with the Curtin of 1939 than the Curtin of 1940 let alone 1943 when he persuaded his party to dump its opposition to conscription. Historically, Labor supported the American-led action in Korea (where it had UN support) but opposed it in Vietnam (where it did not). More recently, Labor supported the Americanled liberation of Kuwait and the removal of the Taliban (where there was overwhelming international support) but not the American-led removal of Saddam Hussein. It would almost certainly be a different alliance under any future Labor government because Labor politicians tend to be less confident about America's judgment and also less confident about Australia's capacity. "Friendships can cope with criticism" say the pro-American opponents of the American position on Iraq. Sure, but the Americans could eventually conclude: "with friends like that who needs enemies". In his Page lecture, Downer compared Curtin's 1938 statement that "Australia is but a minor power…a small nation" with Kim Beazley's almost identical comment, six decades later, that "we are a small country in a world of giants". This notion of "Australia lite" is a justification for avoiding challenges rather than an accurate reflection of Australia's potential. It ignores the strategic importance of the five divisions of the First AIF (which halted the final German offensive in 1918) and of the four divisions of the Second AIF (which, among other things, conquered Syria and swept the Italians from North Africa) as well as Billy Hughes' role at Versailles and Doc Evatt's in the founding of the United Nations. In retrospect, the Americans might certainly have benefited from more British and Australian advice in postwar Iraq. As things stand, Australia's recent capacity building operations in the South Pacific mean fewer failed states for the Americans to worry about. From today's perspective, the period between the early 70s and the mid 90s, is starting to look like Australia's own isolationist era, an aberration between vigorous junior partnership in the Anglo-American enterprise and full participation in the western alliance. From Whitlam to Keating, full of good intentions but fixated on how to define ourselves and neurotic about giving offence, Australia was a comparative bystander in international affairs. It's inconceivable that governments between Whitlam and Keating would have had the selfconfidence to liberate East Timor or even the flexibility to enter a reconstruction partnership with Indonesia. Typically, John Howard understates the change, merely hinting, in his recent Lowy Institute address, at "the true reach and moral seriousness of Australia in today's world, our power and our purpose". The most significant influences on our relationship with America will continue to be the changes that take place here in Australia. The stronger and more self-confident Australia becomes, the greater our contribution, not just to the American alliance, but to the civilisation of which we form no minor part.

Source: US-AUSTRALIA LEADERSHIP DIALOGUE