A great and powerful friend

The alliance that brought Australia and the US closer together was one of the Menzies government’s greatest achievements. By David Furse-Roberts.

Even before the United States entered the Second World War to fight alongside Australian forces in both Europe and the Pacific, Robert Menzies appreciated the bonds of kinship between Australia and the United States. In his own lifetime, Prime Minister Alfred Deakin had invited the American Great White Fleet to visit Australian shores in 1908 and Australian soldiers had fought together with US troops on the Western Front in the Great War. Menzies regarded the history and development of the two countries as analogous with British pioneers crossing vast oceans to explore new continents, build new settlements and forge new democratic civilisations comprised of immigrants drawn from Britain and all of Europe. Australians and Americans therefore both saw the thirst for freedom, the spirit of adventure, the appetite for enterprise, a sturdy self-reliance and a sunny optimism for the future as critical to their common national psyche. At the same time, however, Menzies understood some of the key differences between the two countries, particularly in their system of government and tradition of jurisprudence. Unlike Australia’s parliament, the Congress of the United States did not operate according to the British principle of responsible government and Australia’s Constitution, in contrast to that of the United States, did not incorporate a Bill of Rights.

The natural affinity of Menzies for the United States became even more apparent following the entry of the United States into the Pacific War with his wartime broadcasts affirming the comradeship between Australian and American forces. Like his Labor opponent, John Curtin, Menzies recognised that Australia needed to defer more to the support of the United States in its campaign to win the war. With the war effort depleting so much of Britain’s man power and resources, the US superseded the UK as the leader of the free world after 1945. While Menzies regarded the historic kinship between Australia and Britain as intimate and imperishable, he appreciated that the Australia of the future would increasingly take its lead from America on security and defence issues. After returning to the prime ministership in 1949, he visited New York in 1950 to give assurance to Australia’s decision to commit troops to the Korean War. This was followed by an address to the US Congress in Washington, where he expressed Australia’s solidarity with America in the defence of freedom and democracy. On his 1950 visit to the United States, Menzies was invested as a Chief Commander of the Legion of Merit.

In a measure to formalise the US-Australian alliance, the Menzies government signed the ANZUS Treaty in San Francisco on 1 September 1951, a foreign policy decision that Menzies would recall with pride as one of the greatest achievements of his government. The architects of the historic Treaty were Menzies’ Minister for External Affairs, Percy Spender, and the US Secretary of State in the Truman Administration, Dean Acheson. The mutual security pact bound Australia, New Zealand and the United States to recognise that an armed attack in the Pacific area on any of the parties would endanger the peace and safety of the others. Despite Britain agitating to join ANZUS in the early 1950s, the Treaty remained confined to a partnership between the three Pacific nations. In addition to codifying Australian-American defence and security ties through ANZUS, the Menzies government cemented the alliance through a second pact, the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO). Executed in Manilla on 18 November 1954, the Treaty sought to engage the United States, Australian and New Zealand in the security and defence of South East Asia. Unlike the ANZUS pact, it included the United Kingdom and France, together with several other Asia Pacific nations including Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines. SEATO was formed as a direct response to Western fears of communist expansion in South East Asia following the retreat of the French from Vietnam after their defeat in the battle of Dien Bein Phu in April 1954. 

Through the ANZUS and SEATO treaties, Australia and the United States forged closer defence and security ties during Menzies’ post-war Prime Ministership. The first major conflict since the 1950-53 Korean War in which Australian troops fought alongside American forces was of course the Vietnam War. As John Howard pointed out, it was actually Menzies himself, and not his successor Harold Holt, who decided in 1964 that Australia would join the United States in the military campaign in South Vietnam.  Menzies thus emerged as not only a sympathiser of the American venture in South Vietnam but an active participant. He concurred with the American perspective that the conflict in Vietnam represented a clash of civilisations between authoritarian regimes beholden to materialistic communism and free countries steeped in religious faith.  For Menzies, it was the common defence of free and democratic ideals in the Asia Pacific that brought Australia and the United States ever closer together.

In recognition of his close affinity with the United States, Robert Menzies assumed the post of Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Virginia shortly after his retirement as Prime Minister in 1966. Returning to the University where he had delivered his Thomas Jefferson Oration in July 1963, Menzies gave a series of lectures later published as Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth (1967). For Menzies, the US-Australian alliance embodied a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. At one level, it was based upon a mutual interest to maintain defence and security in the Asia Pacific, but in a deeper sense, it was rooted in a common resolve by the two English-speaking democracies to advance the ideals of human freedom as the great antidote to tyranny and oppression.

Selected Menzies quotes on the American alliance

“Not only do we [Americans and Australians] speak the same language, but to a large extent we have the same thoughts and we act in the same way. We are both equally devoted to the rights of man. We are both unhesitatingly and resolutely opposed to the overthrowing of those rights by any tyrant. Both of us…have had a similar history, a history in which industrial skill and power and rising standards of living have followed upon a pioneer age in which foundations were built by brave and adventurous people who know how to dare the unknown and greet the unseen with a cheer”

Robert Menzies, Broadcast to the People of the United States of America, 4 July 1941

“It is not be wondered, or scoffed at, that we have a friendship with you, for we know that you have the same principles. Our unwritten alliance with the United States is a spiritual one”

Robert Menzies, ‘American – Australian Relations: What are they and Why?, Riecker Memorial Lecture Number 12, University of Arizona, 1967

“We in Australia, of course, are British, if I may say so, to the boot heels. But we also happen to be people who have for the United States and for the people of the United States a tremendous feeling, not just of friendship or respect, but of affection”

Robert Menzies, “Anglo-American Friendship”, Address to members of the American-Australian Association, New York, 20 May 1953

“We are ever mindful of the warmth of relations between ourselves and the people, of the United States of America – an association which I am sure can only grow in strength as both our countries work together in the cause of freedom and justice within the framework of the democratic way of life”

Robert Menzies, Message to Governor of the State of Arizona, 29 August 1962

David Furse-Roberts is the editor of Menzies in his own words: A collection of quotes. You can purchase the book here