Forever young: ANZUS turns 70
Brendan Nelson reflects on 70 years of the ANZUS alliance at a joint MRC-AmCham event in Canberra. The following is an edited transcript of the speech.
What I'm about to say to you is much about the history of ANZUS, as it is about the future. History is of vital importance for us to understand our future. And when little else in the world seems to make much sense, in my opinion, and experience, history is the guiding discipline. It reminds us to where, in our best selves, we know we need to go. And a sense of history also reminds us that there are very difficult decisions that have to be made and the consequences of not making them. It can also point us to new horizons. It can inspire, and it also demolishes prejudice.
The most important year in this country's history, by any standard, is 1788. The British first fleet arrived and devastated millennia of rich Aboriginal history, custodianship, and culture. But from that event and everything that would follow, the origins of the Australia that we are, and the people that we have now become.
The next most important year, to me, was 1942 and fortress Singapore fell, and the following day, our then wartime Prime Minister, John Curtin, in a national address to the nation, and imagine as an Australian hearing this, when he said: "The fall of Singapore should be regarded as Australia's Dunkirk. And the protection of this country," he said, "is no longer that of a contribution to a world at war, but resistance to an enemy threatening to invade our shores. And that state," he said, "was not only the Americas, but the entire English speaking peoples."
Then, days later, bombs fell on Darwin. We had the United States and Royal Australian Navies together in the battle of the Coral Sea, in early May, inflicting a strategic defeat over the Japanese. The origins of which would be the ANZUS alliance, in my opinion, formalised in 1951.
The Americans inflicted a major defeat over the Japanese at Midway, which forced them to abandon a seaborne landing at Moresby and instead get to Moresby from the north of New Guinea, across the hinterland. A gripping struggle at Kokoda, Isurava, Milne Bay, Gona, Buna, Sanananda, the American sacrifice at Guadalcanal, miniature submarines in Sydney Harbour, in late May. It was a desperate, desperate year.
And then at the end of the war, we, Australia, emerged, inconsolably mourning 40,000 dead. The Americans had 300,000 casualties in the Pacific from December, 1941 to the end of the war. 103,000 dead, half their bodies never found. There's not a day should go by in this country where we do not give thanks for American sacrifice in the Pacific, and what it meant for the freedoms that we enjoy, and too often, my generation has taken for granted.
The second world war had three major geo strategic consequences for Australia. The first is, that we knew that we could no longer rely on Britain for our security. We would instead look across the Pacific to the United States. It also created the conditions for Australia to engage, in time, an emergent Asia, and an Asia with which we could engage on equal and respected terms. And the third major consequence was, it laid the foundations for what would be a struggle that would endure two generations between communism and democracy.
1942 was also a significantly important year for us, for Liberals, for the Menzies Research Centre. It was the year, of course, in which Sir Robert Menzies delivered his Forgotten People radio broadcasts, and then subsequently wrote the book, The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy, in honour of his son, Ken, who was serving in the second AIF. And of course, as a philosophical and a values touchstone for us, he spoke of the salary earners, the shopkeepers, the skilled artisans, the farmers, the professional men and women. "Unorganised and unselfconscious," as he said. "Not rich enough to will power in their own right, and too individualistic for pressure politics. And yet," he said, "they are the backbone of the nation, and in their children they see their greatest contribution to it."
Sir Robert would later say in 1944, in looking at a liberal vision for Australia, "That true liberals," he said, "had great and imperative obligations to the weak, the sick and the unfortunate, and to every good citizen, this country would owe not only a chance in life, but a self-respecting life." Fundamental values.
And for the United States, for me, etched in marble there in Washington DC, at the Jefferson Memorial, the promissory note that he wrote in co-authoring the American Declaration of Independence, which speaks not only to America, but to countries and citizens of countries like ours, who believe in political, economic and religious freedoms. When he said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, but they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that governments are instituted amongst men to uphold these rights.”
Those values, common values of our liberal democracies inform character. Character derives from the Greek word, it means the impression left in wax by a stone seal ring. The Greeks called it the stamp of personality. It's informed by worthwhile intrinsic virtues, whether for individuals or for nations. And they are deeply rooted in our adversities, those events that have shaped us as a people, our heroes, those who we choose to honour, our villains, our triumphs, and our failures, and how we also respond to emerging, new, and increasingly threatening horizons.
Values are not, for a nation, a notice board upon which we are placing evidence of the latest fad sweeping the country. Nor are they a social media posting which is a description of how we think we're going to be over the next six or 12 months. They are enduring. And we should not, under any circumstances, abandon what Arthur Schlesinger described in the 20th century as historic purpose.
In 1949, Sir Robert Menzies, of course, led the Liberal Party to victory, and for the second time, would become the prime minister of Australia, and the first Liberal prime minister, and longest serving of Australia. In 1949, the communists also had a victory in the Chinese civil war. The United States of America rejected a Pacific pact, a model and an architecture for security in our region, which would be akin to that of NATO. We also saw, with decolonisation, the fermenting of politically and religiously motivated insurgencies in our region. We saw Russia and China nurturing revolution in the region. And then, when President Truman made the decision to commit United States forces to the defence of South Korea against the Chinese back north, our then-foreign minister, Percy Spender, was ebullient, as the Australian government committed to the Korean war. And he said that the United States would repay Australia over a hundred times more than whatever contribution we made.
And so, the ANZUS alliance was formalised in San Francisco on the 1st of September in 1951. It had been born not only of what John Monash had done at Hamel and the breaking of the Hindenburg line, and the leadership of the American troops, nor just, but in my opinion, predominantly what happened in the Coral Sea and the events that followed it, but also the milieu in which it was negotiated, conceived, and then signed, in 1951. And never forget also that the Russians were acquiring nuclear weapons.
That ANZUS alliance has four key pillars. It has a political pillar, an economic one, a diplomatic pillar, and then of course, defence. It has given us Australians capability, intelligence, interoperability, an intensity of joint training with the United States, operational coordination, and indeed, a hand-in-glove ability for us to operate militarily, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, access to missiles and missile technology. It's given us tradeand investment benefits, the exchange of people, research, culture, and a whole range of benefits which too often, we take for granted, or we don't actually think about in our day to day, week to week, and month to month lives.
In 1961, a decade after the ANZUS alliance had been signed, the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia was formed, and it was regarded as having four objectives, to facilitate interaction between business, political and community leaders on both sides of the Pacific, to also open up lines of communication, to challenge and change thinking in the United States and in Australia in relation to trade and investment, and also to explore opportunities to further develop that. And for those of you that are unfamiliar with it, the chamber commissioned Deloitte to do a paper specifically to document the value of that relationship today.
China is, as we know, Australia's largest trading partner, but the most significant and important economic partner this country has is the United States. It has, on aggregate, represented between six and seven and a half percent of this nation's GDP in the decade to 2019. In 2018, it was 7% of Australia's GDP, $74 billion in two way trade and investment. And then when you add to the investment made by American and predominantly American owned companies in Australia, employing 325,000 people, it is some 7% of GDP.
When this country, when Australia came into the pandemic, we owed the world $1.1 trillion. That is now about $250 billion more than it was when we came into it. The gap between our savings and our investment requirements are about 4% of GDP.
The only way we can underwrite further investment productivity, employment, growth and prosperity is if we have access to those very wide and deep equity markets in the United States. And the alliance is the framework for that and a whole range of other things that are important to us.
In terms of endurance, Stephen Walt, in 1997, documented what makes an alliance endure. And there are three things that the ANZUS alliance has which allows it to endure: its hegemonic leadership, it's also, shared strategic identity, which comes back to those values, to which I spoke, and it's also about resolve. There is a resolve on the part of both Australia and of the United States, but consistently, and typically for Australians, certainly, it lacks the degree of formality that perhaps you might see in other alliances. Australian governments, various governments, have been accused at times of being too subservient to the United States in the context of the alliance. The truth of it is, that perhaps there have been some periods when it's been like that, but in the early years of the alliance, Australia was particularly forward-leaning in relation to it. But whatever the character of the alliance and what happens within the relationship, it's given Australia an opportunity to get a sense of what the United States is actually thinking, and also an opportunity, and at times, discharged our responsibility to shape it.
A decade ago, in 2011, Henry Kissinger's Time on China was published. And you will recall, for those of you who've read it, in the latter quarter of the book, he spoke about the Indo-Pacific and he made the observation that there is much in this region, which is very similar to that of Europe after unification of Germany in 1871, where diplomacy became a zero sum game and there was advanced, and rapid, militarisation in the number of the countries in Europe. But also in our region, we have deep unresolved historical enmities. We also have a number of countries throughout the region who regard militaries as being there to be used for various purposes.
We are, as we all now know, living through the most consequential geo-strategic realignment in our lifetime. As the Prime Minister said, a year ago on the 1st of July, when he was releasing the defence strategic update, "We live in a world that is very similar to, it has similarities to, the world of the 1930s and the early 1940s. That we're about to emerge into a poorer, more dangerous and less organised world." Our policy as a country, as we now know, overall, is to shape, deter and respond. And in terms of shaping, we saw Marise Payne, our foreign minister at ANU in, I think it was June last year, deliver that speech where the centre-right government was firmly recommitting itself to multilateralism, to drive bilateral arrangements with countries that share similar values with us, but also to drive multilateral arrangements both in our region and globally.
We've seen the Quad at work reinvigorated in 2017. We saw Exercise Malabar and some other naval exercises. And we've seen with the change of the administration in the United States, a re-commitment to these multilateral arrangements, which have been the bedrock of security, particularly in our region, since the end of the second world war. And then with the Quad, the impact that that's already had.
I certainly would suggest to you on the G7, I note for the first time the G7 specifically mentioned Taiwan in its communiqué, and then almost a decade after I was in Brussels, arguing for NATO to take a global approach to Euro Atlantic security, when Madeleine Albright was doing the strategic concept. We now have NATO and the secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, describing Russia as a threat and China as a challenge.
And from my perspective, I suspect that the French, and particularly the Germans, are not ready to outsource their policy on China to the United States, but nonetheless it is quite significant now, that NATO, as the secretary general said, "Covers all threats from all directions." And there were many times Michael, when I would be meeting the President of the European Council, the secretary general of NATO, or the President of the European Commission, a decade ago, and I would say to them, no matter what the meeting was about, whatever it was about, whether it was a wine agreement or passenger name record agreement, whatever what is about, I would always finish the dialogue with a discussion of the Indo-Pacific. And I would say to them, "There's trouble coming and it's going to come out of our part of the world." And I remember a very, very senior European official said to me, "Oh Brendan, no, it'll be years before we can focus on Asia in any serious way." I said, "Oh really?" I said, "If that's the attitude Europe's going to take, you'll find Asia is going to find you a lot quicker than you think, and in ways that you won't like." And when he asked me what I meant, I said, "Well, if the South China Sea's closed for a week, you're going to know about it. You had $700 billion worth, of euros, worth of trade went through there last year, which was then 2010, and if it's closed, the United States will be engaged immediately. That will have consequences.”
And so it's very pleasing, I think, for Australia, certainly for me, to see that now the European union, and certainly NATO, recognises the consequential changes that are occurring in our region.
For us, it's also, it's about deepening the alliance and in all of its facets, not just the military and the intelligence sharing, but all of the facets. And for us at AmCham, it's trade and investment ties, extremely important. We delivered a report to the government recently about what needs to be done to further increase US investment in Australia, which is critically important at the moment. It's about resolve and capability on the part of Australia. We need to have new and more modern, and extensive, capabilities. We also need more potent, longer range combat systems. And we need a strengthening of our supply chains.
What's shaping us predominantly is that US-China relationship. And just think, just reflect on this, in 1982, the Chinese economy was 9% the size of that of the United States. Within the next few years, depending on how you measure it, the Chinese economy will be as big as that of the United States, perhaps even bigger.
It's also about the fragility or stability of that global base, that rules-based global order, which is so important to us, which we all, to varying degrees, have taken for granted, which has been challenged in recent years. The fragility of certain nation states, the pace of military modernisation, terrorism, which hasn't gone away, it certainly hasn't gone away and it will be back no matter our best efforts. And then these asymmetric, unexpected threats that are coming from different parts of the world that we're not expecting.
For Australia also, I think in a defence sense, we need to be deepening our engagement with the United States on anti-submarine warfare. And we also, obviously, are fully committed to, we need to be working a lot more closer on missiles and missile technology.
In finishing, I was asked recently by one of the defence chiefs, what advice should be given to the Defence Minister, Mr Dutton? And I said, "Well, I've made a commitment not to give my colleagues free advice once I've finished these jobs." But I said to him, "The most important thing is that the United States government needs to understand that technology transfer to countries like Australia… As I said to president, George W. Bush, when he was president, I said, "Mr President, I know you've got a book listing good guys and bad guys in your top drawer. Australia, I know, will be on the good guy list, and if we're not at the top of it, I'd like to know why?"
In the environment that we face, we must do everything we can. Now, in terms of our shared values, the, as I said, Jefferson's promissory note and everything that has come since, on the American side, for us in our liberal democracy, to expedite the transfer of technology and defence capability to a small number of countries like Australia, we cannot afford to be in a situation where tensions escalate even further, and we're frustrated in the transfer of essential defence capability to Australia.
We got the National Technology and Industrial Base in 2017 - Canada, United Kingdom and Australia - which is an immense step forward. However, President Biden's America first Policy is like our Australian Industry Capability on steroids, threatening our common objectives in the region. And I see when Dr Kathleen Hicks, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, was going through her committal process, approval process, that she was asked about this, and she said that what we need to do is to see the National Technology and Industrial Base in terms of competition, collaboration and innovation, as a way of strengthening our common supply chains. Thank you.
This is an edited transcript of a speech delivered by the Hon Dr Brendan Nelson AO at a joint MRC-American Chamber of Commerce event in Canberra on 23 June.