David M. Andrews

Allies, partners, friends. What’s in a name?

The Australian Financial Review published an article yesterday by James Curran and Les Hewitt entitled “The map that shows Australia’s nine most important allies”. In order, the ‘alliances’ listed here are:

As much as it excites me to see one of my key research interests in the news, I’m afraid that the article is likely to cause as much confusion as clarity. As such, in the spirit of respectful academic exchange, I feel compelled to offer a response. Donning my alliance analyst-cum-scholar Homburg, some thoughts follow.2

Nine alliances for mortal men, or, one treaty to bind them?

Simply put, Australia does not have nine allies. It has two. New Zealand and the United States. Likewise, Australia has only one alliance: the 1951 ANZUS Treaty.3

However, Australia does possess a wide array of security partners, and maintains several formal (i.e. written) security agreements and treaties. As such, this article is, more accurately, about Australia’s most important security agreements.4

While terms like ‘alliance’ or ‘pact’ are thrown around freely in the public discourse, in diplomatic, governmental, and academic circles, they carry very specific connotations. I do appreciate the preference for newspapers to use non-academic language, but it is really important – especially in this article – to clarify at the outset what an alliance actually is and is not, given the rhetorical weight the term carries.

Particularly when the explicit purpose of the article is to explain Australia’s alliances / security agreements, and goes on to discuss treaties, strategic partnerships, and dialogues, I can’t help but feel this is a crucial omission. Professor Curran even notes in the article:

The clue to working out which alliances take precedence is the one word that describes it. A “treaty” takes the cake over a “partnership” or “dialogue”, both of which provide more general frameworks for discussion and co-operation rather than a list of formal obligations.

A treaty carries a set of binding agreements between nations and, as DFAT notes, “gives rise to international legal rights and obligations”.

Even so, while a treaty may carry greater weight than a partnership, this is only a necessary, but insufficient, condition for an agreement to constitute an alliance.

When we say alliance we tend to mean a military alliance. There are multiple definitions (it’s academia, after all) but this one from Alexander Lanoszka’s excellent book Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century is a good place to start:

I define military alliances as arrangements made between two or more sovereign states on the basis of a written treaty that serves to coordinate military policy toward at least one common goal.

Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century, 2022, pp.13-14

By this standard, none of the agreements listed here apart from ANZUS constitutes an alliance. However, as I will elaborate below, Australia may in fact be a member of some ‘quasi-alliances’.

Where was Gondor when the Westfold fell? ‘Consulting’?

When discussing contemporary alliances, NATO is often held up as the idealised, archetypal alliance. This is largely thanks to Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, which forms the basis of the alliance’s principle of collective defence.

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Article V, North Atlantic Treaty, 1949

There’s a whole other argument about what Article V actually requires of its members, but the important thing to note here is that other agreements are often held up to the NATO standard only to be found (arguably) wanting for a lack of an explicit requirement for collective defence.

However, it is important to remember that NATO’s Article V provision is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to security agreements. Take the US bilateral alliances with Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea. I’ll spare you a close textual analysis of one treaty compared with another, but the short version is that they all use a very similar construction of words: that the parties would “immediately consult” (ANZUS’ Article III) in the event of a threat to their security, and “declare that [they] would act to meet the common danger in accordance with [their] constitutional processes” (ANZUS’ Article IV).

Professor Curran poses ANZUS’ Article III negatively against NATO’s Article V, but then neglects to consider ANZUS’ Article IV – or address that this same language is present in all of the US’ Asian alliance treaties. Australia is not an outlier here. The two articles must be taken together, and it is the latter which seem to carry the greater weight.5

The key point here is to remember that alliances are more than a treaty. Rather, they are relational; built and reinforced over time, with a level of mutual trust and understanding. The treaty sets out the terms of the states’ public commitments and gives each party a standard to which they can hold the other(s), but they are not the totality of an alliance. These institutions evolve and grow, both in expectations and understanding, as well as in the nature and scope of the commitments.

In that sense, Australia may not have a written NATO Article V equivalent, but it does have an array of supporting agreements that underpin its alliance. I entirely agree that the Pine Gap Treaty, the Australia-US Force Posture Agreement, AUKUS, and the Five Eyes community are crucial to Australia’s defence and security. However, I would argue that these are better understood as aspects or functions of Australia’s alliance with the US, as reflected in ANZUS’ Article II:

In order more effectively to achieve the objective of this Treaty the Parties separately and jointly by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.

On the topic of consultative agreements, there are three other agreements which Australia is a member of which are important to note here: the 1971 Five Power Defence Arrangements, 2022 Australia-Japan Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation, and the 1987 Joint Declaration of Principles between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

I had a piece published in The Lowy Institute’s Interpreter earlier this week on that very topic, so I’ll direct you there instead of going over the same ground again, but the short version is that through those agreements Australia has committed itself to very similar terms to ANZUS’ Article III. As such, I’d give the Australia-Japan Joint Declaration much more prominence here than the Reciprocal Access Agreement.

Namárië

I ought to bring things to a close at this point, but hopefully this has provided some additional explanatory value if you’re interested in alliances and security agreements.

There’s certainly more that could be said, but on the whole I think the agreements listed comprise a very good starting point to help people understand Australia’s international defence, security, and intelligence relationships. I simply wish that, given the rare opportunity to expound on a topic like this, we could have seen a clear delineation between alliances (with their particular security commitments) and the many other forms of partnerships that exist.

If you’re interested to read more on the topic, reach out and let me know!

  1. For clarity, this is how it was written in the article. The official name is the Quad, not the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or QUAD. ↩︎
  2. A brief aside: I will preface all subsequent comments with the caveat that I suspect this is mostly a consequence of over-zealous headline writers/editors, judging by the actual hyperlink title. “Australia’s military and spy networks” would have been much more appropriate way of framing it! I appreciate that ‘alliance’ is much punchier for a newspaper, but it is factually wrong and surely goes against the entire premise of an ‘explainer’ article. ↩︎
  3. Australian Governments can be a bit inconsistent in classifying New Zealand as an ally (see: 2016 Defence White Paper p.22 compared with 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper p.24) but even though the US withdrew their security guarantees from New Zealand in 1986, the trans-Tasman bilateral ‘leg’ is still in effect (see: 2023 New Zealand Strategic Foreign Policy Assessment p.15). ↩︎
  4. Another gripe with the headline writer, but even if we look past the question of terminology, the article still doesn’t examine Australia’s top nine allies but alliances [sic]. The question of who are Australia’s top nine specific security partners is also an interesting one, though! ↩︎
  5. I don’t want to pain an entirely rosy picture here, though, as if a positive outcome is predetermined. Of course, for the parties to the alliance to “act in accordance with the constitutional processes” allows for plenty of room to manoeuvre, as does the need to first come to a shared understanding of the “common danger”. This is the point that Professor Curran makes with reference to Australian attempts to obtain a US commitment to aid Australia in a military conflict with Indonesia in the 1960s. Every alliance is political, unquestionably; my main point here is to emphasise that ANZUS is more than simply a consultative agreement, and that even if it weren’t, that wouldn’t matter. In an alliance the treaty isn’t the endpoint, but the (a?) beginning. It’s just the written basis for the evolving (or, conceivably, stagnating or collapsing) alliance. “It’s what you do with ’em”, as it were, that counts. ↩︎

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