ANZUS

• 1. Introduction

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  ANZUS is a collective security treaty signed on the 1st of September 1951 in San Francisco, binding Australia, New Zealand, and the United States to a shared defence framework in the Pacific. It entered into force on the 29th of April 1952. For more than thirty years it held without serious controversy. Then, in a single winter month in 1985, a guided-missile destroyer named USS Buchanan arrived at a New Zealand port and was turned away. That refusal cracked the three-way pact in a way that has never been fully repaired. What caused it? Why did New Zealand's government choose a domestic anti-nuclear stance over a formal military alliance with its most powerful partner? And what became of a treaty that, technically, still exists? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Building the Pact

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  Percy Spender, Australia's minister for external affairs, spent much of 1950 pushing for a broad Pacific security arrangement. He wanted Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States at the same table. The British and Americans were uninterested at first, both preferring to limit their involvement in Asian affairs. Spender was blunt about what a pact without the Americans would be worth: "meaningless", in his own word. Two events changed American minds. The communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 raised alarm, and the Korean War, which began in mid-1950, brought urgency. Australia had already committed forces to Korea before Britain did, a gesture that went noticed in Washington. The Americans came to the table, though Spender knew the final text would not be as strong as NATO's automatic commitment to armed assistance. He expected the US Senate would never ratify anything that bypassed Congress's power to declare war. So the treaty was written to mirror the Monroe Doctrine's language: that an attack on any signatory would be regarded as "dangerous to its own peace and security". Each party would "act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". It was a commitment, but not an automatic one. Spender captured the gap between informal assurance and formal treaty when he noted that "Presidents come and presidents go."

• 3. Three Decades of Quiet

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  For more than thirty years after 1952, the treaty produced little public debate. New Zealand served under it in the Korean War and took part in the Malayan Emergency and the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation as part of British Commonwealth Forces. The Vietnam War was the first conflict New Zealand entered without British involvement. As an ANZUS member, New Zealand provided military and non-military assistance to the United States war effort in Vietnam from 1963 until 1975. Combat forces from both New Zealand and Australia withdrew in 1972, and New Zealand continued non-military medical aid until 1975. The alliance was tested again, quietly, in 1983 when the Reagan Administration asked Australia to provide monitoring sites near Sydney for testing the MX missile, a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Tasman Sea was wanted as the target area. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party had agreed. When Bob Hawke's Labor government won office in 1984, however, Hawke withdrew Australia from the testing programme under pressure from the Labor Party's left-wing faction, drawing criticism from the Reagan Administration. The left faction also sympathized strongly with the anti-nuclear stance being taken at that same moment by their counterparts in New Zealand's Labour Party. The Reagan Administration secured its Australian military communications facilities only after assuring Hawke's government that those installations would not be used for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which the Australian Labor Party also opposed.

• 4. The Nuclear Rupture

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  France had been conducting nuclear tests on South Pacific islands, and the United States Navy operated under a deliberate policy of refusing to confirm or deny whether its vessels carried nuclear weapons. Against that backdrop, New Zealand's Labour Party won the 1984 election. Prime Minister David Lange moved quickly. He barred nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships from New Zealand ports and waters, citing the dangers of nuclear weapons, French testing in the South Pacific, and opposition to President Reagan's policy toward the Soviet Union. The practical effect was total: since the US Navy would not declare what its ships carried, no US Navy vessel could enter. In February 1985, New Zealand refused a port-visit request from the USS Buchanan, a guided-missile destroyer capable of launching nuclear depth bombs. The refusal stung because New Zealand had unofficially invited the United States to send a ship in the first place. The Americans interpreted it as a deliberate slight. Opinion polling illuminated how deeply the public backed Lange. Before the 1984 election, 58 per cent of New Zealanders had already opposed US warship visits, and over 66 per cent lived in locally declared nuclear-free zones. A 1986 poll found 92 per cent opposed nuclear weapons in New Zealand, 69 per cent opposed warship visits, and 92 per cent wanted New Zealand to promote nuclear disarmament through the United Nations. The United States, after consulting Australia and failing to reach agreement with New Zealand, announced it was suspending its treaty obligations to New Zealand until US Navy ships were re-admitted to New Zealand ports. The phrase Washington chose carried its own weight: New Zealand was "a friend, but not an ally".

• 5. Rainbow Warrior and the Aftermath

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  On the 10th of July 1985, agents of the French Directorate-General for External Security bombed the Greenpeace protest vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, killing one person. Western leaders were notably silent. That silence hardened public opinion in New Zealand, deepened domestic opposition to the military use of nuclear technology, and pushed New Zealand toward building relationships with small South Pacific nations rather than leaning on its traditional allies. New Zealand's nuclear-free policy became law on the 8th of June 1987 with the passing of the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act. That was more than two years after the Buchanan was refused entry and a full year after the United States had suspended its treaty obligations. US Secretary of State George P. Shultz stated that the ANZUS structure remained in place should New Zealand one day reverse course. President Reagan, in National Security Decision Directive 193, kept New Zealand's status as "a friend, but not an ally". A 1991 poll in New Zealand found that 54 per cent of those sampled preferred to let the treaty lapse rather than accept visits by nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered vessels again. The anti-nuclear stance had become a settled part of New Zealand political culture, and American politicians who tried to change it found themselves working against a durable domestic consensus.

• 6. Australia Holds Its Ground

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  While the split dominated headlines, Australia's alliance with the United States remained fully operational. Annual ministerial meetings, known by the acronym AUSMIN, replaced the old trilateral ANZUS Council of Foreign Ministers. The first bilateral Australia-US meeting was held in Canberra in 1985; subsequent meetings alternated between the two countries. Australia continued to allow US warships into its ports, continued joint military exercises with the United States, and went on sharing intelligence with New Zealand despite the split. Unlike NATO, ANZUS had never built an integrated defence structure or dedicated standing forces, so what Australia and the United States practised was a web of joint activities: naval exercises, battalion-level special forces training, officers assigned to each other's armed services, and jointly operated ground stations for spy satellites and signals intelligence in Southeast and East Asia as part of the ECHELON network. On the 16th of November 2011, US President Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard met in Canberra and announced that 2,500 American troops would be deployed to Darwin. That deployment, on Australian soil, marked one of the most visible expressions of the alliance's continuing depth.

• 7. Gradual Thaw with New Zealand

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  US assistant secretary of state Christopher Hill described the nuclear dispute in May 2006 as "a bit of a relic" and said that rather than trying to change each other's minds, the two countries should focus on "things we can make work". He praised New Zealand's involvement in Afghanistan and its reconstruction work in Iraq. New Zealand had in fact contributed 191 troops to Afghanistan after the September 2001 attacks, and despite Prime Minister Helen Clark's public criticism of the 2003 Iraq war, New Zealand sent engineer troops for reconstruction under UN Security Council Resolution 1483. Underneath the public dispute, military cooperation had quietly resumed: it was later revealed that New Zealand and the United States had restarted cooperation across eight areas in 2007. The formal signal came in 2010, when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Wellington for three days and signed the Wellington Declaration, which defined a "strategic partnership" and was understood to end the ANZUS dispute of the previous 25 years. On the 19th of June 2012, the two countries signed the Washington Declaration, pledging to promote closer bilateral defence and security cooperation. On the 20th of September 2012, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the lifting of the 26-year-old ban on New Zealand warship visits to US Department of Defense and Coast Guard bases. In November 2016, a US guided-missile destroyer accepted an invitation to New Zealand's Royal New Zealand Navy 75th Birthday Celebrations in Auckland, becoming the first US warship to visit New Zealand in 33 years. Prime Minister John Key approved the visit under the 1987 nuclear-free law after satisfying himself the ship was not nuclear armed or powered. That same ship, the Sampson, was diverted shortly after to the Kaikoura region following the 7.8 magnitude earthquake on the 14th of November 2016, joining naval vessels from Australia, Canada, Japan, and Singapore in humanitarian assistance.

• 8. Taiwan, AUKUS, and Open Questions

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  Taiwan presented the alliance with a question it has never fully resolved. In August 2004, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer implied in Beijing that the ANZUS treaty would not apply to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Prime Minister John Howard quickly corrected him. In March 2005, after China passed an Anti-Secession Law and a Chinese official suggested Australia might need to reassess the treaty, Downer stated that Chinese aggression against Taiwan would bring the treaty into force but would require only consultation with the United States, not a commitment to war. The distinction between obligation to consult and obligation to fight runs through the treaty's original language and has never gone away. In late 2021, a new arrangement answered part of that question in a different direction: Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the AUKUS agreement, a trilateral security partnership explicitly separate from ANZUS. New Zealand did not participate. Under New Zealand's 1987 nuclear-free law, any nuclear-powered submarines developed under AUKUS would be banned from New Zealand waters. The treaty signed at San Francisco in 1951 remains technically in force among all three original parties, with New Zealand still partially suspended. The 1996 designation of New Zealand as a major non-NATO ally under 22 US Code section 2321k gave New Zealand a recognised status that sits between ally and friend, an ambiguity that mirrors the treaty itself.