Australian and U.S. Military Cooperation: Fighting Common Enemies (review)

The ANZUS alliance between Australia and the United States (the 'NZ' has been silent since New Zealand unilaterally abrogated the treaty over nuclear ship visits to its ports in 1985), is the keystone of Australian national security policy and has proven a remarkably flexible and durable relationship since its formal inception in 1952. Although Australian-American military cooperation goes back, informally, through two world wars, Hubbard's book asks whether the alliance is, in fact, a "natural" one given the disparity in history, size, aspirations, and the geographic placement of the two parties.

Critiques of the alliance are a regular occurrence, at least on the antipodean side of the Pacific, further emphasising the one-sided nature of the treaty; it is fundamental to Australia, useful to the United States. As in the 1920s and 1930s, economic relations are often more strained than purely military ones, and it is to the latter that Hubbard directs our attention in seeking to understand the continuing, even increasing, closeness of action and purpose between the parties. Joint exercises and training, intelligence sharing, Australian access to the products of the military-industrial complex, and close membership of the "Coalition of the Willing" (Australians have joined three U.S.-led coalitions since 1990), explain the temperamental and psychological closeness each enjoys with the other.

The book will be of most interest to American readers for its analysis of the recent past: from the so-called "joint intelligence facilities," through differing stances on issues of nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction, and the Proliferation Security Initiative, to the close interoperability forged and demonstrated in East Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Hubbard presents a robust discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the alliance from Australia's point of view, refreshingly free of cant and the usual predetermined outcomes. There is a certain amount of social science theorising, appropriate to a book intended in part as a text, but this does not get in the way of the book's real substance. Since 2000 Americans have subjected some of their alliance relations to harsh scrutiny, not least those with various European states, in light of the strains revealed by differences over Iraq and, more recently, Iran. This book points again to the eternal primacy of national interests over sentiment in relations between states, and suggests that "great and powerful friends" must tend to their relations with their juniors. This includes, not least, those most likely to be taken for granted.

The bibliography is adequate though confined to secondary sources. The index is almost useless, and the publishers deserve a rap over the knuckles for this, and for the extortionate price.