ANZUS Pact

ANZUS Pact, treaty between the governments of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, signed in San Francisco, United States, on September 1, 1951. It was ratified and became operative on April 29, 1952.

The alliance grew out of common interests perceived by the three signatories and was intended to achieve more than the specific considerations of defence that were the eventual driving force behind the Treaty. This perception had been enhanced by the costly conflict in the Pacific during World War II, and especially by the Korean War, following the invasion of South Korea by North Korea in June 1950. Having failed to achieve a US-British Commonwealth pact, Percy Spender, Australian Ambassador to the United States, in particular insisted that this war intensified the need for Australia and New Zealand to seek an American guarantee of their security.

The original draft text was the result of talks held in Canberra, Australia, between John Foster Dulles, American Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959, Percy Spender, and Frederick Doidge, New Zealand Minister for External Affairs, and represented a delicate balancing of opposing views. Nevertheless, the idea of a specifically tripartite treaty had aroused little interest in the United States Congress or among American chiefs of staff. It was regarded by New Zealand chiefs of staff as an unlikely possibility and had encountered objections from Britain, which led the Australians to suspect that British influence might endanger prospects of American cooperation. As a pact which would bring together two members of the Commonwealth of Nations into an alliance with a foreign power—and exclude Britain—ANZUS was seen by the British as a “serious event in history”, the remark made by Winston Churchill to Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister of Australia, and another indication of Britain's progressive loss of global influence.

The official Treaty consisted of 11 Articles, covering approaches to international disputes; mutual aid against armed attack; and the formation of a Council of Foreign Ministers to implement the Treaty, which would remain in force “indefinitely”.

The alliance's most critical challenge from within came in 1984, when the New Zealand Labour Government led by David Lange banned nuclear-capable vessels from New Zealand waters and declined a visit from an American warship, the USS Buchanan. The American reaction was unexpectedly hard-line; the Reagan administration, having underestimated the power of the anti-nuclear lobby in New Zealand, felt “kicked in the teeth” by the ban. The terrorist-style bombing of the Greenpeace vessel, Rainbow Warrior, by agents of the French Secret Service in July 1985, combined with the persistence and intensity of French nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, gave a much sharper edge to New Zealand's anti-nuclear sensitivities than was to be found in Australia. The Australian anti-nuclear stance was evident in the Treaty of Raratonga between Australia, New Zealand, and the smaller Pacific islands, as was opposition by the two countries to French nuclear testing. The tests conducted by the French at Murusoa Atoll have been of great concern in the region since the 1970s.

A variety of US sanctions against New Zealand followed. The ANZUS Pact became effectively bilateral in 1986 when the United States backed down from the security commitments to New Zealand that had been arranged under the Treaty with the Australian Government acting as intermediary in the stand-off. The impasse was resolved when the United States announced in 1992 that its warships would no longer be nuclear carriers; normal relations between the two countries were restored in 1994, returning the ANZUS Pact to its original status.

The Pact remains in force, though both Australia and New Zealand have conducted wide-ranging rethinking on defence during the past decade, in the light of changing world circumstances and approaches to defence. This rethinking is exemplified by Australia's Defence White Paper (1987), and Force Structure Review (1991), and in New Zealand's Defence White Paper (1991).