A sustained tantrum: how the Joint Chiefs of Staff shaped the ANZUS treaty

ABSTRACT

Unsurprisingly, most of the literature on the origins of the ANZUS alliance examines why the treaty came into existence in 1951, emphasising the role of John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s Special Representative, Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, and Percy Spender, the Australian Foreign Minister. This paper takes a different approach. It focuses on the policy priorities of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and argues that the JCS played an important, underappreciated role shaping the text and therefore the nature of the ANZUS treaty. Their coordinated intransigence within the interagency process—described by Acheson as a ‘sustained tantrum’—limited the geographic scope of ANZUS to the Pacific area and prevented Australian policymakers from gaining access to non-Pacific bodies such as NATO. Most importantly, the JCS limited the institutionalised depth of the treaty by preventing the Australian government from gaining access to the Pentagon’s global strategic planning. The policy priorities of the JCS in 1951, and their success at influencing the ANZUS agreement to reflect these priorities, holds enduring significance for the US-Australia alliance, which is simultaneously dominated by the two countries’ militaries yet hampered by underdeveloped mechanisms for policy formulation and institutionalised military cooperation.

KEYWORDS:

• ANZUS origins
• US-Australia alliance
• Australian foreign policy
• Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)
• civil–military relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dougal Robinson is a Fulbright Scholar in Strategic Studies and International Economics at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington DC. He is concurrently a Non-Resident Fellow in the Foreign Policy and Defence Program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, and has previously served in Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

Notes

1 The text of the ANZUS Treaty was initialled by the parties on 12 July 1951, signed in San Francisco on 1 September 1951, and entered into force on 29 April 1952. The full text of the Treaty can be accessed via: http://australianpolitics.com/topics/foreign-policy/anzustreaty-text.

2 The three Defense personnel were Earl D. Johnson, Assistant Secretary of the Army, representing the Department of Defense; Maj. Gen. Carter B. Magruder, Special Assistant for Occupied Areas in the Office of the Secretary of the Army; Col. C. Stanton Babcock, Chief of the Government Branch under General Magruder. The State Department delegation included Allison, Deputy to Dulles, Robert Fearey from the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, and John D. Rockerfeller III, a Consultant to the Mission, as well as of course Dulles himself (See FRUS 1951, 141).

3 American diplomats John Foster Dulles (then a Consultant to the Secretary of State) and Dean Rusk gave Spender in principle acceptance of a security pact on 30 October 1950, before Spender’s remarks to Parliament highlighted above.

4 There is no record of the 10 July meeting in FRUS. However, in light of the position of the JCS over several months, it seems highly probable that the addition of ‘Foreign Ministers or their Deputies’ was due to the JCS (See FRUS 1951, 226).