After World War II, Australia and New Zealand shared two fears, a resurgent Japan and the spread of communism, and one reality, that the UK was no longer a power in their region. Enter the US, which needed a resurgent Japan but which also feared the spread of communism.
Thus it was, in San Francisco on 1 September 1951, that the ANZUS treaty was signed. The venue is telling. Six years earlier, delegates from 50 nations had unanimously adopted the UN Charter at the San Francisco Opera House. The UN is embedded in the language of the treaty, and the first article reads:
The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.
Things broke down in the mid-1980s. The US had always maintained a “neither confirm nor deny” policy on whether its vessels carried nuclear weapons while New Zealand had just introduced a nuclear-free policy. The upshot was that no US vessel could visit any New Zealand port.
Since then, this tripartite treaty has operated so that Australia has a bipartite treaty with each of the US and New Zealand, while the US and New Zealand may not have much of a treaty at all.
From time to time, the parties get around this. In September 1999, President Clinton visited Auckland. In 2010, Secretary of State Clinton co-signed the Wellington Declaration. This included the statement:
The United States-New Zealand strategic partnership is to have two fundamental elements: a new focus on practical cooperation in the Pacific region; and enhanced political and subject-matter expert dialogue – including regular Foreign Ministers’ meetings and political-military discussions.
While the Wellington Declaration is optimistic, the “is to have” tells of a continuing gap.
ANZUS will play a small role in determining whether and how long the Pacific Ocean remains pacific. A year to the day after ANZUS was born, Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea.
