Unholy Fury (43 page)

A THORN IN THE SIDE

Brown's fulminations and tirades aside, the Americans had to adjust to these Australian winds of change. Throughout much of the first half of 1974, Whitlam and his senior ministers continued to express their disagreement with the United States on key regional issues, especially the proposal to enlarge the US naval base at Diego Garcia, a tiny atoll in the Indian Ocean, the establishment of diplomatic relations with North Korea and the bombing of Cambodia. In short, the Whitlam government became something of an irritant to America's Asian strategy. Fundamentally, these differences amounted to divergent interpretations of the meaning of détente in Asia. Where the Australians saw the relaxation of tension between the United States and the USSR and China as a kind of circuit breaker between the rigidity of the Cold War and the opportunities offered by a new multipolar world, the Americans saw détente as fragile. They felt on ‘the threshold of détente' but saw instability and fragility at every turn.
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Australia's new ambassador in Washington, Patrick Shaw, got the message early. After his first meeting with Robert Ingersoll, the assistant secretary for East Asia and the Pacific, Shaw recalled that:

 

the point which came through … was his unspoken disagreement with the assessment of the Australian government that major war in the Asian and Pacific Area was unlikely for some time to come. Ingersoll by implication criticized Australia for taking for granted the facts of the détente between the United States of America and the USSR and China whereas in his view the arrangements so far reached were brittle and active support was required to maintain them.
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It was a telling clarification of the ongoing differences in how to make sense of the new world of the early 1970s. Where Australians saw a new departure, Americans only perceived ongoing instability in a new form. Marshall Green used a speech in Sydney to declare emphatically that ‘we cannot assume any permanent détente. We are only on the threshold of détente … there are many dangers lurking in an uncertain world of transition'.
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And at a meeting in Canberra
in early 1974, the deputy assistant secretary for East-Asian Affairs, Richard Sneider, observed that ‘it was perhaps in Asia alone that the two countries had different slants on the problems; outside of Asia, both sides were in general agreement'. The Americans continued to stress the Nixon doctrine ‘not as a means of escape from problems in Asia but as a form of continuing commitment'. The secretary of Australia's Foreign Affairs Department, Alan Renouf, countered with a short lesson in geopolitics, pointing out that the differences were ‘because Australia looked at policies in Asia from its own part of the world while the United States was geographically more detached'. But for the Americans these types of assessments rang hollow. Green countered that Australia, contrariwise, was in a ‘healthy position … its past enemies were now its friends … Japan, China and Indonesia. Australia did not perceive an immediate threat … [it] was more hopeful about détente than the United States'. Other US officials continued to express their concern with the ‘incompleteness of the situations in Vietnam and Korea'. In relation to Vietnam, Sneider added, the odds had been ‘6 to 4 on a resumption of hostilities last Autumn'.
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Those sharp strategic differences came to the fore again when Australia announced in February 1974 its intention to normalise relations with North Korea. Fearing a resumption of hostilities between the North and South, the US protested strongly, questioning both the rationale and utility of the Australian decision. The Australians were told they would have to expect some sort of diplomatic retaliation from South Korea. Patrick Shaw informed the Acting Secretary of State Kenneth Rush that although the US might question Australia's timing, the issue ‘could hardly be classified as a matter of strategic concern'. Indeed, he added, Australia ‘regarded the move as a step in the extension of the détente policy to which the US was committed'. For Rush however the recognition of the North Korean regime could ‘not be separated from other elements in the sum total of a world strategic situation'.
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Here again the global and regional optics of the two countries parted company. Where Whitlam saw the policy as being in line with ‘the principle of universality in the United Nations' and therefore in accord with
his liberal internationalist principles,
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the Americans stressed that Australia's action ‘ignored the special responsibilities of the United States in the Korean peninsula'. Recognition, it felt, would be an ‘unwelcome encouragement' for Pyongyang, ‘while the ROK [South Korea] could become difficult if it felt that the diplomatic process was sweeping its interests under the rug'.
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Australia was simply moving too fast, and too soon, for America's liking.

More broadly, senior officials in the State Department interpreted Australian actions on North Korea and Cambodia as threats to the American posture in Asia, or, as Sneider emphasised at an ANZUS council meeting in Canberra in February 1974 ‘all these things had a cumulative effect on the integrity of the American “shield”' in the region.
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Whitlam's comments in Thailand about the ‘militarily ineffective and morally monstrous' American bombing of North Vietnam only served to rub salt in the barely healed wounds of December 1972. Rush not only summoned the Australian ambassador in Washington to tell him firmly that Whitlam's ‘views were already well known and did not need repeating', but was himself also instructed by Nixon to confront Whitlam over the comments when he visited Australia for the ANZUS council meeting later that month. The Department of Foreign Affairs heard subsequently that Rush had ‘spoken bitterly' about Australia in the plane en route to Canberra from Wellington, ‘almost in “we could go and jump in the lake” terms'.
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Once in Australia, Rush took the opportunity at the meeting to present a lecture about the harsh realities of the world situation. A personal report to Whitlam on the ANZUS council meeting conveyed the American tone:

 

one of their main purposes was to caution us against forgetting the continuing basic objectives both of the Soviet Union and China, and especially the Soviet Union. Rush spoke frequently of vigilance, the need for military strength, the protective cover under which change could take place, the existence of open and closed societies, the dependence of détente on the ‘free world' maintaining as strong a military relationship towards the Soviet union as it would have in an area of confrontation … In fact
Rush's reversion to Cold War terminology was one of the features most commented on by other delegates.
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It showed a certain US discomfort with Australia's eagerness to leave the mantras and mindset of the Cold War behind. But Whitlam remained unmoved: he distanced Australia sharply from the Lon Nol government of the Khmer Republic arguing that US support was only lengthening the civil war in Cambodia, one he believed had to be settled by the people themselves. While Green continued to stress that the US had ‘nothing to do with the toppling of Sihanouk in 1970', it was met with a stern Australian warning that ‘it would be necessary for the United States to live with Australian policy in these areas'.
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Another cause of differences was Diego Garcia, in the central Indian Ocean where the United States had established a naval base and communications facility. On this issue, Whitlam was on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand he saw the US military buildup there as a blow to his and other regional countries' plans for a neutral ‘Zone of Peace' in that part of the world—on the other he did not wish to be seen to be giving the Soviet Union a strategic edge in the region, or to be seen as siding with the Kremlin against the United States. Having already pressed the US in private that they could ‘not let things go by default in the Indian Ocean',
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he was not impressed when Australia was omitted from US consultations about plans for expansion of the base: in the words of one Australian official: it was ‘simply not good enough'. For Whitlam, however, it showed the difficulty in balancing commitment to the alliance with his government's new emphasis on regional cooperation. Australia's appeals to both the US and the USSR to exercise ‘mutual restraint' fell largely on barren ground, and exposed a certain posturing in the Australian approach to this question.

NATIONAL SECURITY STUDY MEMORANDUM 204

In July 1974, the month before he resigned from office, Nixon's ongoing concern about the drift in relations with Australia took the form of a National Security Study Memorandum. This report, prompted
by the ‘recent changes in the Labor government', was expressed in a decidedly gloomy tone. In a tasking memorandum sent out by Kissinger, the relevant government agencies in Washington were commissioned to explore options for relocating key US military installations currently in Australia to other sites; to assess both the ‘impact on our alliance with Australia of curtailing or ending … intelligence sharing' and the ‘prospects for growing divergence between Australia and US policy in Asia and elsewhere'.
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The questions themselves showed the seriousness of the White House intent: they were asking for options which, if implemented, would have amounted to emptying the alliance of all meaningful content. This was an American administration seriously considering moving out of Australia.

This study, declassified only in 2014, brought together all the US concerns and anxieties about Whitlam and his policies. These were not the idle or indulgent ruminations of a select group of disaffected Washington policy makers; nor the offhand remarks of a president or national security adviser fuming about the latest Australian ‘monstrosity'. Indeed the very institution of the national security study memoranda had been one of Nixon's first acts as president, and the documents to emerge from these reports constituted the main tools for studying and deciding upon issues of national security and foreign policy.
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Memorandum 204, like so many of the studies commissioned by Nixon and Kissinger across the whole range of America's global interests, reflected the collective wisdom of the departments of State and Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. A staff member of the National Security Council also assisted in the preparation of the report. The overriding objective of Memorandum 204 was to consider the future of the US strategic installations in the context of other policy problems with the Australian government. Everything was subordinated to this—a telling indication, if one was ever needed—of the supreme importance Washington attached to the facilities. For the United States, the facilities came first: those facilities defined the alliance.

That this memorandum took as its starting point a resurgent Labor left shows a certain disquiet in Washington at the prospect
of greater pushback from once trusted allies. As US analysts looked out over the region five years on from the promulgation of the Nixon doctrine, they discerned some positives: most countries had accepted a reduced American presence, and there was no real likelihood of the Soviet Union or China moving in to fill any kind of power vacuum. But there was also mounting unease at how the United States might strengthen an alliance system that was feeling the strain of adjusting to the ‘trend towards American withdrawal'. Many countries were also being whipped by the icy winds of international economic storms, their internal systems plagued by divided electorates and weak governments. The challenge was how to sustain ‘positive alliance relationships at a time when we and the allies feel we need each other less and when many allies are uncertain if we are still reliable'. One consequence of all these changes, noted Richard Smyser on the National Security Council staff, was that ‘our Alliances have softened'. And there was no one-size-fits-all approach for how to deal with tetchy or nervous friends. Where some allies, like Australia, ‘are straining at what they think is a leash', others, like the Philippines, were trying to adjust their alliance with the United States through quiet negotiations. The very likely prospect was that democracies in Japan, Australia and New Zealand would produce governments ‘less ready to collaborate with us'. In the specific case of Australia, Kissinger was being told that the ‘basic relationship' was being assessed through a National Security Study Memorandum since ‘Marshall Green is uncertain and the Department of Defense very skeptical'.
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Australia was seemingly running on very thin ice.

Memorandum 204 did not pull any punches.
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It depicted a relationship under pressure for several years because of Australia's desire for greater self-reliance in foreign affairs and Whitlam's style of governance. The ‘Australian approach' to the world was characterised by an ‘aversion to anything that smacks of the cold-war or superpower condominium and by a desire to associate with the causes of the world's under-privileged'. A more assertive Labor Party left wing, emboldened by Cairns's elevation to deputy prime minister, would be likely to press for the removal of US defence installations. In June Cairns had given an interview in which he stated his firm
and explicit opposition to the continuation of US defence facilities and his wish to ‘get Australia out of the big power military system'.
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Officials in Washington wondered whether Cairns ‘could be trusted with information on our sensitive installations in Australia and on the data we obtained from them'. And although Whitlam might have been understanding in private on the vital importance to the US of these facilities, the Americans continued to be worried by his ongoing desire to push for a greater Australian role in their operation.