ANZUS
The Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty is a collective security agreement between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States that was signed in 1951, and from which New Zealand has been partially suspended since 1986. It firstly recommits the parties to the purposes of the United Nations, prohibiting the use of force or threats except in self-defence. The following provisions require the parties to maintain their "capacity to resist armed attack", consult with each other on security matters in the Pacific and declare that an armed attack on any of the parties "would be dangerous to peace and safety" and that each signatory "would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". It also provides for a council of the signatories foreign ministers, in which the implementation of the treaty can be discussed.
The treaty was one of a series that the United States formed in the 1949–1955 era as part of its collective response to the threat of communism during the Cold War. New Zealand was suspended from ANZUS in 1986 as it initiated a nuclear-free zone in its territorial waters. In late 2012, the United States lifted a 26-year-old ban on visits by New Zealand warships to US Department of Defense and US Coast Guard bases around the world. New Zealand maintains a nuclear-free zone as part of its foreign policy and is partially suspended from ANZUS, as the United States maintains an ambiguous policy whether or not the warships carry nuclear weapons and operates numerous nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines; however New Zealand resumed key areas of the ANZUS treaty in 2007.
Treaty structure
The treaty was previously a full three-way defence pact, but was disrupted following a dispute between New Zealand and the United States in 1984 over visiting rights for ships and submarines capable of carrying nuclear arms or nuclear-powered ships of the US Navy to New Zealand ports. The treaty has lapsed between the United States and New Zealand, but remains separately in force between both of those states and Australia. In 2000, the United States opened its ports to the Royal New Zealand Navy once again, and under the presidency of Bill Clinton in the US and the government of Helen Clark in New Zealand, the countries have since reestablished bilateral cooperation on defence and security.While ANZUS is commonly recognised to have split in 1984, the Australia–US alliance remains in full force. Heads of defence of one or both states often have joined the annual ministerial meetings, which are supplemented by consultations between the US Combatant Commander Pacific and the Australian Chief of Defence Force. There are also regular civilian and military consultations between the two governments at lower levels. Annual meetings to discuss ANZUS defence matters take place between the United States Secretaries of Defense and State and the Australian Ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs, and are known by the acronym AUSMIN.
Unlike the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, ANZUS has no integrated defence structure or dedicated forces. Nevertheless, Australia and the United States conduct a variety of joint activities. These include military exercises ranging from naval and landing exercises at the task-group level to battalion-level special forces training, assigning officers to each other's armed services, and standardising equipment and operational doctrine. The two countries also operate several joint-defence facilities in Australia, mainly ground stations for spy satellite, and signals intelligence espionage in Southeast and East Asia as part of the ECHELON network.
During the 2010s, New Zealand and the US resumed a close relationship, although it is unclear whether the revived partnership falls under the aegis of the 1951 trilateral treaty. The Wellington Declaration of 2010 defined a "strategic partnership" between New Zealand and the US, and New Zealand joined the biennial Rim of the Pacific military exercise off Hawaii in 2012, for the first time since 1984. The US prohibition on New Zealand ships making port at US bases was lifted after the 2012 exercise.
History
Origins
Following the fall of Singapore and the decline of British power in Asia, Australia began to search for other partners to ensure its security. Australia and New Zealand also felt threatened by the possibility of a resurgent Japan and the spread of communism to their North. Percy Spender, Australia's minister for external affairs, sought a broader Pacific security agreement in 1950 which would include Australia, the UK, other Commonwealth countries and the United States. The latter's participation was essential, with Spencer stating the agreement "would be meaningless without the United States". At this point however, both the UK and the US were uninterested in such an agreement, with both seeking to limit their engagement with Asia.The beginning of the Korean War in mid-1950 changed American views. Australia committed to the Korean War before the United Kingdom and continued to further court the Americans. While Australia could not convince the US to sign a harsher peace treaty with Japan to restrain future military aggression, they did press for further assurances that they would retain a voice in Pacific security decisions and for an American security commitment in return for their approval of the treaty. The United States was initially reluctant, but the need to strengthen the West against communism grew with the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and the 1950–1953 Korean War. The treaty allayed antipodean fears that such a peace would allow Japan to threaten them again.
The United States was initially reluctant, with the president instead offering an informal guarantee of protection. However, Australia pushed for a more formal agreement, with Spender noting that "Presidents come and presidents go." However, the treaty did not include an automatic commitment to armed assistance like in NATO, with Spender expecting that this could not be ratified by the US Senate, who would wish to retain the congressional power to declare war. Instead, the text of the treaty mirrored the text of the Monroe Doctrine which stated that attacks on the American continent would be seen as "dangerous to its own peace and security".
The resulting treaty was concluded at San Francisco on 1 September 1951, and entered into force on 29 April 1952.
Korea, Malaysia, Borneo and Vietnam
The treaty itself was not a source of debate for over 30 years, with New Zealand participating as part of the British Commonwealth Forces in the Korean War and the Malayan Emergency, followed by the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation, and directly as part of ANZUS in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was the first conflict New Zealand entered that did not involve the British or any other Commonwealth countries outside of Australia. As an ANZUS member New Zealand contributed military and non military assistance to the United States war effort in Vietnam from 1963 until 1975. New Zealand and Australian combat forces were withdrawn in 1972 and New Zealand non-military medical aid continued until 1975.Australian reservations about the MX missile
In 1983, the Reagan Administration approached Australia with proposals for testing the new generation of American intercontinental ballistic missiles, the MX missile. American test ranges in the Pacific were insufficient for testing the new long-range missiles and the United States military wished to use the Tasman Sea as a target area. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party had agreed to provide monitoring sites near Sydney for this purpose. However, in 1985, the newly elected Prime Minister Bob Hawke, of the Labor Party, withdrew Australia from the testing programme, sparking criticism from the Reagan Administration. Hawke had been pressured into doing so by the left-wing faction of the Labor Party, which opposed the proposed MX missile test in the Tasman Sea. The Labor left-wing faction also strongly sympathized with the New Zealand Fourth Labour Government's anti-nuclear policy and supported a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone.To preserve its joint Australian-US military communications facilities, the Reagan Administration also had to assure the Hawke Government that those installations would not be used in the Strategic Defense Initiative project, which the Australian Labor Party strongly opposed. Despite these disagreements, the Hawke Labor Government still remained supportive of the ANZUS security treaty. It also did not support its New Zealand counterpart's ban on nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered ships. Following the ANZUS Split in February 1985, the Australian government also endorsed the Reagan Administration's plans to cancel trilateral military exercises and to postpone the ANZUS foreign ministers conference. However, it still continued to maintain bilateral military ties and continued to share intelligence information with New Zealand. Unlike New Zealand, Australia continued to allow US warships to visit its ports and to participate in joint military exercises with the United States.
New Zealand bans nuclear material
In 1985, the nature of the ANZUS alliance changed significantly. Due to a current of anti-nuclear sentiment within New Zealand, tension had long been present between ANZUS members as the United States is a declared nuclear power. France, a naval power and a declared nuclear power, had been conducting nuclear tests on South Pacific Islands. Following the victory of the New Zealand Labour Party in election in 1984, Prime Minister David Lange barred nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships from using New Zealand ports or entering New Zealand waters. Reasons given were the dangers of nuclear weapons, continued French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, and opposition to US President Ronald Reagan's policy of aggressively confronting the Soviet Union.Given that the United States Navy had a policy of deliberate ambiguity during the Cold War and refused to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons aboard its warships and support ships, these laws essentially refused access to New Zealand ports for all United States Navy vessels. In February 1985, a port-visit request by the United States for the guided-missile destroyer USS Buchanan was refused by New Zealand, as the Buchanan was capable of launching RUR-5 ASROC nuclear depth bombs. As this occurred after the government unofficially invited the United States to send a ship, the refusal of access was interpreted by the United States as a deliberate slight.
According to opinion polls taken before the 1984 election, only 30 per cent of New Zealanders supported visits by US warships with a clear majority of 58 per cent opposed, and over 66 per cent of the population lived in locally declared nuclear-free zones. An opinion poll commissioned by the 1986 Defence Committee of Enquiry confirmed that 92 per cent now opposed nuclear weapons in New Zealand and 69 per cent opposed warship visits; 92 per cent wanted New Zealand to promote nuclear disarmament through the UN, while 88 per cent supported the promotion of nuclear-free zones.