Unholy Fury (6 page)

Yet behind these policy failures lay a deeper truth about Labor's foreign policy in the immediate postwar years. For all their professed faith in the tenets of liberal internationalism and collective security, for all their language and rhetoric about a new world organisation that could deliver peace and harmony, Labor simultaneously pursued a realist policy based on power politics, and they therefore hoped that their great power allies could be persuaded to join in safeguarding Australia's regional security.
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Chifley's reluctance to support initial British attempts in 1948 to form a western alliance against the Soviet threat in Europe derived from the fear that the strategic nightmare of the previous forty years was about to be replayed: with Britain and America concentrating their defence resources in Europe and therefore leaving Australia vulnerable in the Pacific. The postwar Labor government initially saw the coming of the Cold War as a threat to the achievement of their Pacific security aims, arguing that a European pact against the Soviets directly contravened the United Nations charter. Indeed they even blamed the United States and the British for seeing every world problem through the prism of an evolving east-west conflict. Evatt could publicly praise America's Marshall Plan—which aimed to rebuild war-torn Europe—but was prone to privately unload his seething resentment of US priorities, telling the British high commissioner in Canberra that Washington was ‘more concerned about their own financial interests than about the peace of the world'.
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By the end of 1948, however, following the Soviet Union's blockade of the US and British sectors in Berlin, the Labor government came to see that the division between east and west was indeed irreversible. After the signing of the North Atlantic treaty (NATO) in April 1949, Chifley again sought a US agreement to a Pacific pact. Again, however, the Australians came away empty-handed. As the prime minister told parliament, the Truman administration's eyes and ears were trained elsewhere: ‘the United States of America is deeply involved in Europe, and regards its work in that theatre as its outstanding and fundamental task, at least for the time being'.
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What Chifley could not mention publicly, however, was that the United States had also expressed its displeasure with its old wartime ally in other ways. The Pentagon, for example, had become off limits for Australian officials, one US intelligence report concluding in August 1949 that ‘Australian contributions to the US military effort are generally considered of negligible value'.
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Furthermore, the United States government was restricting some classified information being sent to Australia on account of their concerns over Chifley's handling of sensitive internal security matters. As Washington looked to put itself on a firmer Cold War footing, it became increasingly anxious that Chifley was not talking the same language or taking the same steps. Indeed there were some in the US embassy in Canberra who believed the Labor administration were ‘crypto-communists' or ‘fellow-travellers'.
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As historian David Lowe has shown, official US reporting on Australian domestic affairs around this time was prone to inflating the reach of communist influence. Thus, for example, the US Naval Attaché came to the near hysterical conclusion that ‘until the parliamentary Labor party is removed from office there is not one chance in ten million that any effective action against Communism can or will be taken'.
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Chifley's action in 1949 in jailing communist officials who had taken part in the miners' strike seemed to have little impact on United States' assessments. An underlying view that the Australian Labor Party was suspect on tackling communists would permeate the Cold War years. And Labor's political opponents were only too happy to feed that perception.

A SENSE OF ASSURANCE—AND ANXIETY

By the time the United States came to look again at the need for some kind of defence arrangement in the Pacific, Labor was out of office and at the beginning of a long stretch in opposition. The ANZUS treaty, which was signed in September 1951, was negotiated on the Australian side by Percy Spender, minister for external affairs in the Menzies Liberal–Country Party Coalition that had come to power in December 1949. Menzies' success in securing the treaty was not, however, due to superior diplomacy. The prime minister showed little support, initially, for a Pacific pact, even telling the
Canadians in August 1950 that such a pact was ‘unrealistic' and an attempt to ‘erect a superstructure on a foundation of jelly'. He had rather nonchalantly dismissed the very idea as ‘Spender's baby'.
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In the event, the conclusion of the treaty was due to dramatic international developments, especially the Berlin Blockade and the Soviet Union's acquisition of atomic weapons. Most crucially in late 1949 the Chinese communist revolution triumphed, and in coming to power the new regime in Beijing had almost immediately entered into an alliance with the Soviet Union. In June 1950 the communist North Koreans invaded South Korea. The whole region seemed to be affected by communist insurgency movements. As a result of these developments the Americans' East Asia policy was transformed and policy makers in Washington decided that they should construct an alliance, comparable to NATO, for the purpose of containing the spread of communism in the region.
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As a result of the extension of the Cold War to Asia, Australia had finally achieved what it had long sought, namely a security treaty with the United States. It was the first time that the Australians had entered into a treaty arrangement to which Britain was not a signatory. And yet neither side got what it originally wanted from ANZUS. From the beginning, the United States was quite clear that it saw no communist threat to Australia and was agreeing to enter into the treaty in order to persuade the Australians to accept a ‘soft peace' for Japan and perhaps to provide a framework for a more comprehensive containment alliance that would include the East Asian offshore island states: an ‘island chain' incorporating other regional allies such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Japan. But the ongoing distrust in both Australia and New Zealand towards the old wartime enemy—and a largely unspoken fear of Indonesian political instability—meant that the original plan never saw fruition. The United States had to content itself with a series of bilateral treaties with its Asian allies, and, in the case of Australia and New Zealand, a trilateral treaty. Nevertheless right from the beginning the United States was clear-headed about how it interpreted ANZUS and its provisions. As its chief negotiator, John Foster Dulles, expressed it in a letter to General Douglas MacArthur immediately after the terms
had been settled: ‘the United States can discharge its obligations … in any way and in any area that it sees fit'.
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And it would seem clear that the United States, understandably, came to act in full accord with that spirit.

Similarly, Australia's lead negotiator, Percy Spender, who wanted access to the Pentagon's global planning processes, had in the end to accept that the United States would never allow the presence of a junior ally at the centre of its policy making. ‘Cold War globalism', stressed his biographer, ‘only seemed to involve Australia incidentally', and Spender was compelled to concede that the United States was never going to invest ANZUS with the same kind of strategic weight as NATO.
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And so Australian officials, ever mindful that the treaty obliged the US to do not very much at all, remained profoundly concerned about what sort of protection ANZUS afforded it. Article IV of the document only committed the parties to ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes'.
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It stood in stark contrast to the more emphatic declaration contained in the equivalent clause of the NATO treaty. The result was that from the beginning Australian politicians and policy makers lived in a state of what historian David McLean calls ‘chronic unease' concerning the level and nature of America's commitment to its security under the terms of the treaty.
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Labor's support for ANZUS came with a twist, reflecting not a nascent anti-Americanism but the legacy of frustration at the repeated rebuttals it had received from the United States for such an arrangement in the immediate postwar years. Evatt, now party leader following Chifley's death in June 1951, stated that the conclusion of such a pact had always been a ‘cardinal object of the policy of the Labor party', but he also lashed out at it as ‘un-British' and committed a future Labor government to legislating for Britain's inclusion in the pact. Evatt was no voice crying in the wilderness here. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had interpreted the signing of the treaty as a blow to British imperial prestige, and public opinion polls taken from mid 1951 suggested that the majority of Australians, while welcoming the new defence agreement with the United States, nonetheless retained strong sentimental ties towards
Britain and continued to regard Australia as a ‘British' country.
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Evatt's reservations about ANZUS above all arose from his suspicion that great powers like the United States would play fast and loose with Australian interests. He had learnt from bitter experience that the smaller powers were inevitably excluded from the higher councils of decision making, and sometimes ignored altogether. As he put it during a speech in the parliament: ‘Australia should have its own foreign policy, which should not be merely the echo of the policy of another nation'. Showing the depth of his lingering suspicion of the threat from the north, he added that ‘Japanese rearmament is too heavy a price to pay for such a pact'.
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Although Australian defence cooperation with Britain continued well into the 1950s—in the commitment of Australian troops to the Malayan emergency, allowing British atomic testing in the South Australian desert and intelligence sharing—by the end of that decade policy makers in Canberra had a sense that in the future they could not expect effective help from Britain in the case of a major threat to their territory. Everything would depend on the United States. With this in mind the Menzies government set about the task of reorganising Australian military structures and armaments to fit those of the United States. The pattern of future defence efforts was largely seen as being in association with US forces.
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Even more they saw the need to integrate America's defence needs with Australia so that US authorities would come to see the defence of Australia as being assimilated to the defence of the United States.

LABOR'S DILEMMA

During the era of the Cold War, therefore, Labor's task was not an enviable one. Whichever way it turned it confronted the harsh realities of a nuclear age. Whichever path it took lurked political pain of one kind or another. The party, riven by factional, religious and ideological division, struggled to craft coherent foreign and defence policies and therefore took stands that were seen to be at odds with popular opinion. These pressures caused a damaging split in 1955 over the question of communist influence in the labour movement. And the breakaway Democratic Labor Party (DLP) was even more
staunchly anti-communist than the ruling Liberal–Country Party coalition. The factional schisms, bitterness and hatreds arising out of this trauma made Labor's ability to deal with international affairs all the more fraught. Party leaders were caught between a left wing flirting with isolationism and neutrality, and the reality that crucial electoral support was bleeding to the DLP. On major policy questions relating to the superpower conflict, including regional security, disarmament, the building of US intelligence facilities on Australian soil and most particularly the war in Vietnam, Labor found itself on the back foot and on the defensive. This division and discord played right into Menzies' hands. Ever the consummate politician, he needed no invitation to ruthlessly exploit Labor's discomfort and damage its credibility in the eyes of the people. Menzies wreaked havoc with Labor's views on national security, depicting its policies as a threat to the future of the US alliance. The times were not propitious for the nuance that leader Arthur Calwell wanted to bring to the management of the US relationship. In a world of moral absolutes and a political culture awash with visions of global conflict and the ever-present threat from Asian communism, the delicate line of declaring greater self-reliance within the alliance was not a political story easily told.

Labor's proposal for a Southern Hemisphere nuclear-free zone, championed in the early 1960s by Calwell and Whitlam, was met with little enthusiasm by US officials. The idea formed the cornerstone of Labor's commitment to the ‘permanent banning of nuclear weapons tests by all nations'—the belief that in universal disarmament lay the foundations for a durable peace.
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The US ambassador in Australia, William (Bill) Battle—a former wartime comrade of President John F Kennedy in the Pacific—told Calwell that any such scheme would ‘in effect modify … ANZUS … by limiting us in fulfilling our obligation under the treaty', reminding him of the danger posed to Australia by ‘Chinese nuclear threats'.
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It was a language the Americans knew would resonate, even if they themselves were rarely willing to spell out in any substantive way their commitment to Australia under ANZUS. In effect, they used the treaty as a Sword of Damocles, daring Labor to carry the burden
of a policy that would ultimately water down the US security guarantee and render it meaningless. Government ministers lined up to repeat the point, and, despite heavy factional pressure to support a ban on all nuclear tests by any nation, Calwell instead acknowledged that any ‘nuclear arms ban must be part of a general program of total and complete disarmament'. He noted the ‘heavy responsibility' that fell on the shoulders of the United States as ‘leader and protector of the Western alliance'. Australia, Calwell added, had ‘its part to play' in that alliance.
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It showed the extent to which Labor, as historian John Murphy has shown, ‘had substantially accepted the terms of foreign policy debate set by the conservatives'.
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