ANZUS

Based on Wikipedia: ANZUS

The Alliance That Broke Over a Ship That Might Not Have Had Nukes

In February 1985, New Zealand told the United States Navy that one of its destroyers couldn't visit. The ship in question, the USS Buchanan, was a guided-missile destroyer capable of launching nuclear depth bombs. Whether it actually carried any nuclear weapons at that moment, nobody would say—the US Navy had a longstanding policy of refusing to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons on any of its vessels.

This ambiguity was the whole point.

But New Zealand had just elected a government that wanted nothing nuclear in its waters, and the Buchanan looked suspicious enough. The refusal of that single port visit triggered a geopolitical rupture that persists to this day, splitting apart one of America's oldest Cold War alliances and turning New Zealand from ally into what US officials would diplomatically call "a friend, but not an ally."

Origins: When Australia Went Shopping for a New Protector

To understand how ANZUS came to exist—and why its fracture mattered so much—you have to go back to the terrifying moment when Australia realized Britain couldn't protect it anymore.

The fall of Singapore in 1942 shattered something fundamental in Australian strategic thinking. Singapore was supposed to be impregnable, the linchpin of British power in Asia, the guarantee that the Empire would always shield its Pacific dominions. When it fell to Japan in a week, 80,000 British and Commonwealth troops became prisoners of war, and Australia suddenly felt very alone.

The war ended, but the fear didn't. By 1950, Australia and New Zealand were looking north with growing anxiety. Japan, though defeated, might rise again. More pressingly, communism was spreading across Asia like a brushfire. China had just fallen to Mao's forces in 1949. The British Empire was clearly in terminal decline. Australia needed a new protector, and there was really only one candidate.

Percy Spender, Australia's minister for external affairs, started shopping for an American security guarantee. The Americans weren't initially interested—they had enough commitments already and weren't eager to add more. But then North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, and suddenly containing communism became urgent business.

Australia moved fast. It committed troops to Korea before Britain did, deliberately positioning itself as America's most eager partner in the Pacific. Australian diplomats made their pitch: we'll support whatever peace treaty you want with Japan, however lenient, but in return we want a formal security commitment.

The Americans offered an informal guarantee. President Truman would simply promise to protect them.

Spender pushed back with a memorable line: "Presidents come and presidents go."

A Treaty Unlike NATO

The resulting treaty was signed in San Francisco on September 1, 1951—the day before Japan signed its peace treaty with the Allied powers. This timing was no coincidence. Australia and New Zealand wanted ironclad assurance that if a resurgent Japan (or anyone else) ever threatened them, America would respond.

But ANZUS was deliberately weaker than the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which had been established two years earlier. NATO's Article 5 commits every member to treat an attack on one as an attack on all—an automatic trigger for collective defense. ANZUS contains no such automatic commitment.

Spender knew the US Senate would never ratify a treaty that bound America to go to war without congressional approval. So ANZUS was crafted with careful ambiguity. It states that an armed attack on any party "would be dangerous to its own peace and safety" and that each country "would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes."

That last phrase is the escape hatch. It means the US could potentially respond to an attack on Australia with stern diplomatic notes rather than aircraft carriers. The language deliberately echoed the Monroe Doctrine, which warned that attacks on the American continent would be seen as dangerous to US peace and security—but which had never actually obligated the United States to do anything specific.

Still, a treaty is a treaty. For Australia and New Zealand, getting their security concerns written down in a formal agreement with the United States was a massive achievement. For over three decades, ANZUS operated smoothly. All three nations fought together in Korea. They deployed to Malaya. They sent troops to Vietnam—the first war New Zealand ever entered without British involvement.

The Nuclear Question

The alliance began to strain in the 1980s, and nuclear weapons were the wedge.

New Zealand had developed a strong anti-nuclear sentiment, driven partly by geography. France, despite having no territory anywhere near New Zealand, had been conducting nuclear weapons tests on islands in the South Pacific since 1966. The tests were atmospheric until 1974—meaning the radioactive fallout drifted wherever the wind took it—and continued underground afterward. New Zealanders watched their neighborhood being used as a nuclear testing ground and grew increasingly hostile to anything atomic.

This wasn't just elite opinion. By 1984, polls showed that 58 percent of New Zealanders opposed visits by US warships, with only 30 percent in favor. More than two-thirds of the population lived in locally declared nuclear-free zones—cities and towns that had symbolically banned nuclear weapons from their territory.

When the Labour Party won New Zealand's 1984 election, Prime Minister David Lange made the anti-nuclear position official policy. No nuclear-powered ships. No nuclear-armed ships. No exceptions.

The problem was that the United States Navy refused to say which ships carried nuclear weapons. This policy of deliberate ambiguity was designed to keep adversaries guessing—if the Soviets couldn't be certain which American vessels were nuclear-armed, they had to treat all of them as potential nuclear threats. It was a cornerstone of Cold War naval strategy.

But it meant New Zealand couldn't allow any US Navy ships at all, since any of them might be nuclear-armed.

The Buchanan Incident

The USS Buchanan was carefully chosen. It was among the least threatening ships the US Navy could have sent—a destroyer, not a nuclear-powered carrier or submarine. It was capable of launching nuclear depth bombs, but so were most American warships of that era, and there was no particular reason to think it was actually carrying any.

The New Zealand government had unofficially signaled that the US should request a visit, expecting to approve a vessel that seemed obviously non-nuclear. But when the request came, New Zealand refused anyway. The Buchanan could theoretically carry nuclear weapons, and the US wouldn't say it didn't, so the answer was no.

American officials were furious. They interpreted the refusal as a deliberate insult—New Zealand had invited a visit and then rejected it. Secretary of State George Shultz announced that the United States was suspending its treaty obligations to New Zealand. The crisis dominated American newspaper headlines for weeks.

New Zealand didn't withdraw from ANZUS. Technically, it's still a member. But the United States stopped treating it as an ally. Joint military exercises ended. Intelligence sharing was curtailed. The defense relationship froze.

Australia's Careful Balance

Australia faced its own nuclear pressures during this period but handled them very differently.

In 1983, the Reagan administration approached Australia about testing its new MX intercontinental ballistic missiles. American test ranges couldn't accommodate the new long-range weapons, and the Pentagon wanted to use the Tasman Sea—the stretch of ocean between Australia and New Zealand—as a target area. The conservative government agreed to provide monitoring sites near Sydney.

But in 1985, the newly elected Labor government under Bob Hawke withdrew from the testing program. The party's left-wing faction was sympathetic to New Zealand's position and supported making the South Pacific a nuclear-free zone.

Here's where Australia diverged from New Zealand: despite canceling the missile tests, Hawke's government never banned nuclear-armed ships. It never demanded that America declare whether visiting vessels carried nuclear weapons. It continued joint military exercises. It maintained intelligence-sharing arrangements, including the joint defense facilities that were part of the ECHELON surveillance network monitoring communications across Southeast and East Asia.

The result was that ANZUS effectively split into two separate bilateral relationships: a fully operational Australia-US alliance, and a suspended New Zealand-US arrangement that existed on paper but meant almost nothing in practice.

The Rainbow Warrior

If New Zealand needed any confirmation that it had made the right choice, France provided it on July 10, 1985.

The Rainbow Warrior was a Greenpeace ship docked in Auckland harbor, preparing to lead a protest flotilla against French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll. French intelligence agents, working for the Directorate-General for External Security, attached two limpet mines to the hull. The explosions killed a photographer named Fernando Pereira and sank the ship.

This was an act of state terrorism, committed by a NATO ally, against a peaceful protest vessel, in a friendly nation's port. And the response from Western leaders was—essentially nothing. There was no serious condemnation. France faced minimal consequences.

For New Zealand, this silence was deafening. The country was watching its traditional allies either attack it directly (France) or abandon it diplomatically (the United States), all because it refused to participate in nuclear weapons proliferation. The bombing pushed New Zealand even further from its old alliances and toward building relationships with other small Pacific nations.

In 1987, New Zealand made its position permanent law. The Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act banned nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered vessels from New Zealand territory, waters, and airspace. The entire country became a legally declared nuclear-free zone.

A Slow Thaw

The Cold War ended. The Soviet Union collapsed. The urgent need to maintain a unified nuclear deterrent faded—but New Zealand's nuclear-free policy remained.

By the early 2000s, both sides were looking for ways to restore some semblance of cooperation. New Zealand sent troops to Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks—engineers, special forces, medical personnel. It wasn't a large contribution (191 troops compared to Australia's 1,550), but it was symbolically significant. Prime Minister Helen Clark even sent engineers to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, though she made clear they were there for UN-authorized reconstruction work, not combat operations.

In 2000, the United States quietly opened its ports to Royal New Zealand Navy ships again. This was a notable gesture—American facilities had been off-limits to New Zealand vessels since 1986.

The formal thaw came in 2010 with the Wellington Declaration, which established a "strategic partnership" between New Zealand and the United States. The declaration carefully avoided the word "alliance," but it signaled that the countries were working together again. In 2012, New Zealand participated in the Rim of the Pacific exercises—a massive biennial naval exercise off Hawaii—for the first time since 1984.

After those exercises, the US lifted its ban on New Zealand ships visiting American military bases worldwide. A 26-year prohibition ended.

What Remains

The ANZUS treaty technically still exists as a three-party agreement. But in practice, it operates as two separate bilateral arrangements.

The Australia-US alliance functions much like it always did, and arguably more intensively. Annual meetings between American and Australian defense and foreign affairs ministers—known by the acronym AUSMIN—coordinate strategy across the Pacific. American and Australian officers serve in each other's armed forces. The two countries run joint intelligence facilities monitoring Asia. They conduct military exercises ranging from naval task groups to special forces battalion training. They standardize equipment and operational doctrine so their forces can fight together seamlessly.

Unlike NATO, ANZUS has no integrated command structure or permanently assigned forces. There's no ANZUS headquarters, no ANZUS commander. But the practical cooperation between Australia and the United States runs deep.

New Zealand occupies an odd middle position. It has restored most practical cooperation with the United States—intelligence sharing, joint exercises, diplomatic coordination. American and New Zealand forces have fought side by side in Afghanistan. But New Zealand remains technically suspended from ANZUS, and its nuclear-free policy remains non-negotiable.

Public opinion in New Zealand has only hardened over time. A 1991 poll found 54 percent preferred letting the treaty lapse entirely rather than accepting nuclear ship visits. That number has likely only grown since. The anti-nuclear stance is no longer controversial domestic policy—it's a point of national identity.

American politicians occasionally float the idea of New Zealand reversing its position, but there's no realistic prospect of this happening. The nuclear-free zone is too popular, too symbolically important, too deeply embedded in New Zealand's sense of itself as an independent nation willing to stand up to great powers.

The Larger Pattern

ANZUS matters beyond its specific members because it illustrates how alliances actually work—and how they break.

Formal treaties are frameworks, not guarantees. The carefully ambiguous language of ANZUS allowed the United States to suspend its obligations without technically violating anything. The treaty says each party will respond to attacks "in accordance with its constitutional processes." It doesn't promise any particular response.

Security relationships depend on continuous maintenance. Australia kept its US alliance intact by making constant accommodations—accepting the ambiguity about nuclear weapons, continuing joint exercises, hosting intelligence facilities. New Zealand decided some things were not worth accommodating, and accepted the consequences.

Small countries have limited options but real choices. New Zealand couldn't force the United States to keep treating it as an ally. But it could decide that its anti-nuclear principles mattered more than the alliance, and it could build alternative relationships with other Pacific nations. The choice wasn't free—New Zealand has less security cooperation, less intelligence access, less influence in American strategic thinking—but it was a choice.

And the world has changed since 1985. The Soviet threat that made ANZUS urgent has vanished. New threats have emerged—terrorism, a rising China, climate change affecting Pacific island nations. The original purpose of ANZUS, containing communism and deterring a resurgent Japan, is now historical. The alliance persists, in modified form, because Australia and the United States continue to find it useful, and because New Zealand has found ways to cooperate without formally rejoining.

Whether that partial restoration really operates under the ANZUS treaty or represents something new entirely is a question nobody seems eager to answer definitively. The ambiguity, once again, is the point.