History, politics, economics and cultural interactions

The Australian-American relationship has been the central issue in Australian foreign policy since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. War in the Asia-Pacific brought Australia into a crucial and ultimately successful military alliance with its powerful Pacific ally, the United States. The bilateral alliance was born of immediate strategic necessity, but was not translated into a permanent post-war security alliance or a special bilateral international relationship. A decade after Pearl Harbor, the enduring ANZUS agreement was negotiated in very different international circumstances from those prevailing during the Allies’ wars against Facism in Europe and Asia. Only when faced with the spread of communism in East and South-East Asia from 1949 did the US generalise its post-war containment policies from Europe to the Asia-Pacific and somewhat reluctantly accept a tripartite security arrangement with Australia and New Zealand. The change in American policy evidenced in acceptance of ANZUS in 1951 was influenced only very indirectly by shared experiences as Allies in World War II. The Truman administration agreed to the tripartite ANZUS alliance only after the Mao’s Communist Party came to power in China in late 1949. Washington accepted ANZUS fundamentally because it believed that America’s containment policies now had to assume global diminsions and incorporate not only Australia but also Japan as a counterweight to communist influence in the Asia-Pacific.

The ANZUS agreement was negotiated as the Cold War spread to mainland Asia. Amidst growing struggles over decolonisation, nationalism and communism, the strategic agreement became, for many in Australia, a reassuring symbol of a deep relationship with a uniquely powerful new protector, the US. Support for the relationship with the United States remained the defining feature of Australian foreign policy in the long year of wars and fragile peace in the Asia-Pacific – through conflicts in Korea and Vietnam; ongoing tension generated by a global Cold War; contests over decolonisation, communism and nation-building in mainland Asia; troubled relations with Indonesia; intervention in East Timor; and military intervention in Afghanistan and invasion and occupation of Iraq that were central to the so-called ‘war on terror’ precipitated by the September 11, 2001 attacks on mainland America.

The bilateral relationship was never limited to the formal ANZUS alliance or collaboration on military-security issues. It was also shaped by intersecting cultures, ideas and technologies – by incessant contacts generated by modernity and globalisation. Given the inexorable spread of American values and technologies after World War II, the asmmetry of Australia’s relationship with the United States was increasingly linked to the influence of so-called ‘soft power’ – the global cultural authority of the United States, often labelled ‘Americanis/zation’. In short, especially after World War II, cultural forces, from the ‘popular’ to the ‘political’, helped shape – or at least symbiotically reveal – Australia’s proliferating relationships with its widely proclaimed ‘great and powerful friend’, the US.

This site, australiaushistory, seeks to highlight the major issues that have long dominated Australian-American relationships: political-military-stategic relations – those linked to the exercise of America’s so-called ‘hard power’; AND economic and cultural relations – intersections that might be understood as linked to the exercise of America’s ‘soft power’ and the broader expression of so-called American hegemony.

Since the 1970s, Professor Roger Bell (UNSW, Sydney, Australia) has published extensively on the multi-faceted relationship between the United States and its enduring Pacific ally, Australia. This site is a guide for students and researchers to the many books and scholarly papers he has written since publication of his pioneering study, Unequal Allies: Australian American Relations and the Pacific War, (Melbourne University Press, 1977). Over three decades, Roger Bell has published extensively on the bilateral relationship,covering political and strategic issues in war and peace, political economy, and from the early 1980s cultural and social interactions centered on debates over so-called ‘Americanis/zation’, modernisation and globalisation.