Unholy Fury (17 page)

In his private meeting with Gorton in the Oval Office, Nixon gave voice to the crisis of confidence besetting America, what he called ‘the growing, dangerous tendency for people to visualise the situation as one in which a great power is hopelessly mired down in a futile war. They throw up their hands in despair and say let's get out of Vietnam right now'. It was the ‘new isolationism' that demanded a retreat, not just from South-East Asia but also from the world in general. Nixon would countenance no such buckling to public pressure, stressing instead his desire to find an ‘honorable conclusion to the war'. Gorton's brief response was to restate the old Cold War verities. There was ‘no doubt', he said, ‘that the countries of South East Asia are conscious of being dominoes, lined up behind Vietnam'.
⁷⁷
The dogmatic nature of this Australian position missed completely the American predicament. Nixon might have been less enamoured of the grandiose national missions and less prone to positioning America as the avatar of liberty, but he was all too conscious of the connection between America's exit from the war and its prestige in the wider world, especially its credibility in the eyes of close allies.

Gorton's world-view, however, remained firmly embedded within the theories and taboos that had defined his generation's political outlook. During this same visit to Washington, in a fiery lunch with Democrat Senator J William Fulbright—a leading critic of the Vietnam War—he repeated the dose. To Fulbright's disparaging comments about the ‘so-called domino theory', Gorton retorted that it ‘might not seem plausible to those living far from the scene, but
the closer one lived to South East Asia, the more tenable and real this theory became'. Gorton, in the words of one report, had ‘listened for a while … then finally turned on Senator Fulbright and told him exactly where he got off'.
⁷⁸
Fulbright again gave a cynical appraisal of Australian foreign policy: asking not only how it managed to ‘get away with a troop contribution of only 8000 men … while at the same time enjoying a reputation of standing firm with the US', but also how it opposed recognition of Communist China while managing to sell enormous quantities of wheat to the same regime. It was, he said, a ‘remarkable performance'. Gorton, according to his own glowing self-appraisal of the lunch, ‘gave as good as he got', adding that the final score was ‘Gorton 2, Fulbright 1'.
⁷⁹
The frank exchange of views had nevertheless shown the deep roots of Gorton's Cold War stance. And it all helped to explain his rhetorical flourish at the conclusion of his toast at a special White House dinner: ‘wherever the United States is resisting aggression … wherever there is a joint attempt to improve not only the material but the spiritual standards of life of the peoples of the world, then sir, we will go Waltzing Matilda with you'.
⁸⁰
The slightly whimsical air of the statement lacked the iron-clad assurance of Holt's ‘All the way' line, and while it might have had at least the virtue of authenticity it still showed an Australian prime minister desperately in search of his own formula to signify his country's ongoing support of the great power.

Gorton, then, was the first real taste the Americans had of a self-proclaimed Australian ‘nationalist'. From the US perspective a more assertive Australia presented both opportunities and obstacles. On the one hand, the prospect of a key regional ally assuming greater defence responsibilities was precisely the model envisaged by the Americans as they looked to recalibrate their Asian posture. On the other, this ‘new' Australia was a curious mix of truculence, requiring more careful management, and trepidation, in search of even more soothing American words about consultation and coordination of policy.
⁸¹

Crucially, however, some US officials felt this was also time to ditch the usual clichés and embark on a wholesale renovation of alliance ritual. ‘We have been old allies', said one State Department policy assessment in 1969, ‘but rhetoric and sentimentality must give
way to mutual accommodation'; the ‘Coral Sea Generation is being replaced by a new generation in Australia that is critical, discerning and increasingly nationalistic'.
⁸²
The statement showed a growing realisation that the stoic words of wartime cooperation in the Pacific had definable limits. Although Australia remained a ‘strategic anchor' for the US south of Asia and between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Americans now had to deal with the widespread fear among the Canberra political elite that ‘the United States may, in a pinch, regard Australia as expendable'. It was clear then that ‘the era has passed when Australia felt secure as a little brother of the United States', and so embassy staff urged colleagues in Washington to accommodate themselves to this new reality.
⁸³

NO MORE ‘HOLLERING TO WASHINGTON'

Those Australian feelings of being made to feel ‘expendable' were given their clearest expression in a short statement delivered by Nixon on the tiny Pacific island of Guam in late July 1969. The president was there to witness the splash down of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, but in a background briefing with American reporters at the Top O' the Mar officers club, he dropped a bombshell. In relation to the ‘problems of military defense', he began, ‘except for the threat of major power conflict, the United States is going to encourage and has the right to expect that this problem will be handled by, and responsibility taken for it by, the Asian nations themselves'.
⁸⁴
What became instantaneously known as the ‘Guam doctrine'—later ennobled as the ‘Nixon doctrine'—sent ripples of paranoia across the region. As historian Edward Keefer has observed, ‘Kissinger and Nixon spent the rest of the trip convincing Asians and others that the United States had not unilaterally decided to pull out of Asia, but that the Nixon doctrine was a way for the United States to remain in Asia after the inevitable backlash against Vietnam'.
⁸⁵

But the United States was, in essence, signalling its intention not to become involved in another land war in Asia, and to encourage allies to assume the initial and major burden for their self-defence. Historian Jeffrey Kimball has questioned not only the extent to which the words Nixon uttered on Guam can be seen as a ‘grand
strategy', but also—given its lack of coherence and consistency—whether in fact it can be seen as a departure from US Asia policy at all. But Kimball also acknowledged that ‘as with other presidential doctrines, repetition caused this abstraction to acquire a life of its own, detached from material existence'.
⁸⁶
And part of the problem for Nixon's advisers was that the very ambiguity of the statement was ready made to cause problems for the administration with its allies. For Australian leaders, the Nixon doctrine was all the more alarming because, without the presence of US troops on the ground in South-East Asia, Australia was back to where it had been before the Vietnam war: namely, profoundly uncertain about what kind of protection ANZUS afforded. Coming on top of the announcement from the British government in early 1968 that its military withdrawal from east of Suez was being accelerated—by 1971 the British would be gone—the Australian government was staring at nothing less than the collapse of its Cold War policy.

If the Australian government took refuge in the reaffirmation of American treaty obligations—Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly emphasised that the United States would abide by its formal security commitments with regional allies—Whitlam pounced on Nixon's statement as evidence that the government's policy was now in tatters. He was almost Olympian in strolling through the debris of the Coalition's alliance faith. ‘The old Liberal certainties and shibboleths have succumbed to the march of events and the test of truth and time. We may be at the end of an era of foreign policy as Liberal propaganda. The whole thing is in the melting pot'.
⁸⁷
Later that year, the international relations scholar Hedley Bull spelt it out even more clearly:

 

The cardinal facts about the Australian-American alliance … are that the United States is moving inexorably away from military involvement in South East Asia; that nothing Australia can do will prevent this, and that the more we demonstrate our loyalty to a posture the Americans themselves are abandoning the more we discredit ourselves in the eyes of those with whom the future of American policy lies.

 

Bull was scathing in his assessment of the government's blindness to the US change. Obsessed with trips to Washington and meetings with the president, they had relied too much on the views of the executive branch and ignored ‘the revolution in public and congressional opinion' which had by then overthrown official US policy on Vietnam. They had ‘wholly failed to understand what forces were shaping American foreign policy', especially the ‘radical change in the United States' attitude to Asia'. His warning was stark: Washington regarded Australia as ‘expendable' and the alliance was ‘at most, one of convenience'.
⁸⁸

The press eagerly took up the thrust of Bull's address, hailing both its analysis and recommendations. As the
Age
put it, there could be no more ‘hollering to Washington for help to drive off the enemy hordes'. The idea of Australia being ‘expendable', mused the
Australian
, was a ‘concept so heretical that Canberra has so far been unable to come to terms with it'. For the first time since Robert Menzies, ‘Australians must appreciate that ANZUS and SEATO are not the be-all and end-all of our protection, nor of our commitment', a phrase Whitlam himself was beginning to brandish in political debate.
⁸⁹
Or, as the
Age
intoned, ‘It is no longer enough to frame our policies on Washington's orders because Washington is seeking new directions which might leave us with no policy at all'.
⁹⁰
So it was hardly a ground-breaking finding when a major American research report into Australia's reaction to the Guam doctrine concluded that the country's behaviour in international policy was now characterised by ‘much incoherence and drift'.
⁹¹

It would take a sombre report from Keith Waller on the implications of the Nixon doctrine, written on his return from Washington, to drive the message home in Canberra. Waller concluded that the American government had downgraded the threat of communist-inspired expansion in Asia and that, as a consequence, ‘its military and economic involvement in the region will also be sharply downgraded'. The ‘US retreat from Asia', Waller wrote, meant not merely disengagement from Vietnam, but also a ‘major withdrawal from the whole area west of Hawaii'.
⁹²
In a period where the anxiety caused by the words ‘east of Suez' prompted panic-stricken
reactions to Britain's withdrawal from South-East Asia, the same eerie resonance was clearly being deployed in Waller's use of ‘West of Hawaii'. As Australia watched both of its great power allies alter their regional footprints, the gaping defence void looked all the more perilous. A sense of double desertion rocked the foreign policy firmament. For Waller these dramatic circumstances appeared to cast doubt on the validity of both the SEATO and ANZUS pacts.

But the lingering doubts took shape not in a declaration of greater Australian independence from the alliance or a concerted effort to build up its own defence, but in the continual seeking of yet more American reassurances about its ANZUS obligations. Waller confided to a senior Australian academic that he had been ‘constantly embarrassed in Washington by a stream of Australian ministers coming through and asking the Americans in effect “Does ANZUS still apply? Are you serious when you say you will help us?” Even though the US administration ‘kept reiterating its sincerity', Waller added, the Australians ‘never seemed to be entirely convinced'.
⁹³

In the United States, meanwhile, serious attention was being given to Labor's improved standing in the Australian electorate. In his 1969 policy speech, Whitlam had promised to withdraw all Australian troops from Vietnam by June 1970, and he attempted to establish a new test for the alliance: ‘the only way', he told the party faithful at Sydney's Town Hall, ‘that Australia can now earn or deserve the gratitude of the American people is to assist them in the liquidation of the war they have come to hate'.
⁹⁴
The Americans were not wildly enthusiastic about prospects for the alliance under a new Labor government. Indeed, before that election it was widely expected in Washington that a resurgent Labor under Whitlam's leadership would prevail at the ballot box. A congratulatory message was even drafted for Nixon's signature, and even though not sent—the Liberal–Country Party coalition were returned, albeit with a much reduced majority—it showed the state of the US diplomatic mind in anticipating that Whitlam would take the reins of power. The scene had been set a month before the poll, with the US ambassador in Canberra, Walter Rice, sending a detailed catalogue of what the US administration could expect from the Whitlam winds of change:
everything from the possible forced closure of American intelligence facilities and withdrawal of defence commitments from Vietnam and Malaysia–Singapore, to the recognition of Communist China. In short, Rice concluded, an ‘isolationist and essentially neutralist' party would preside over the end of the ‘special relationship' between the two countries. Indeed, so severe would be the ‘strains' in the fabric of the alliance that a relationship which ‘goes far beyond the wording of the ANZUS treaty would have little utilitarian value to us under a Labor government'.
⁹⁵
It was a doomsday scenario.

On the basis of this gloomy assessment, the National Security Council briefed Kissinger that ‘Whitlam will be harder to work with than Gorton' and for that reason advised early ‘diplomatic cultivation'. The ‘achievement of our foreign policy objectives in East Asia and the Pacific requires—or at least would be much more difficult in the absence of—Australian cooperation'. The White House, however, was much more confident of ultimate success, but that optimism was based on a distant past: