ANZUS
The Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS or ANZUS Treaty) is a 1951 non-binding collective security agreement initially formed as a trilateral agreement between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States;[1] and from 1986 an agreement between New Zealand and Australia, and separately, Australia and the United States, to co-operate on military matters in the Pacific Ocean region, although today the treaty is taken to relate to conflicts worldwide. It provides that an armed attack on any of the three parties would be dangerous to the others, and that each should act to meet the common threat. It set up a committee of foreign ministers that can meet for consultation.
Abbreviation
The treaty was one of the series that the United States formed in the 1949–1955 era as part of its collective response to the threat of communism during the Cold War.[2] New Zealand was suspended from ANZUS in 1986 as it initiated a nuclear-free zone in its territorial waters. In late 2012, the United States lifted a 26-year-old ban on visits by New Zealand warships to US Department of Defense and US Coast Guard bases around the world. New Zealand maintains a nuclear-free zone as part of its foreign policy and is partially suspended from ANZUS, as the United States maintains an ambiguous policy whether or not the warships carry nuclear weapons and operates numerous nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines; however New Zealand resumed key areas of the ANZUS treaty in 2007.[3][4]
ANZUS was overshadowed in late 2021 by AUKUS, a trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It involves cooperation in nuclear powered submarines that New Zealand did not support. Australia and New Zealand "are poles apart in terms of the way they see the world. ... I think this alliance underlines that they're going in very different directions,” said Geoffrey Miller, an international analyst at the Democracy Project in New Zealand.[5]
Treaty structure[edit]
The treaty was previously a full three-way defence pact, but was disrupted following a dispute between New Zealand and the United States in 1984 over visiting rights for ships and submarines capable of carrying nuclear arms[6] or nuclear-powered ships of the US Navy to New Zealand ports. The treaty became between Australia and New Zealand, and between Australia and the United States. While the treaty has lapsed between the United States and New Zealand, it remains separately in force between both of those states and Australia.[7] In 2000, the United States opened its ports to the Royal New Zealand Navy once again, and under the presidency of Bill Clinton in the US and the government of Helen Clark in New Zealand, the countries have since reestablished bilateral cooperation on defence and security.[8]
While ANZUS is commonly recognised to have split in 1984, the Australia–US alliance remains in full force. Heads of defence of one or both states often have joined the annual ministerial meetings, which are supplemented by consultations between the US Combatant Commander Pacific and the Australian Chief of Defence Force. There are also regular civilian and military consultations between the two governments at lower levels.
Annual meetings to discuss ANZUS defence matters take place between the United States Secretaries of Defense and State and the Australian Ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs are known by the acronym AUSMIN. The AUSMIN meeting for 2011 took place in San Francisco in September. The 2012 AUSMIN meeting was in Perth, Western Australia in November.[9] AUSMIN continues to meet annually, most recently in 2023.[10]
Unlike the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), ANZUS has no integrated defence structure or dedicated forces. Nevertheless, Australia and the United States conduct a variety of joint activities. These include military exercises ranging from naval and landing exercises at the task-group level to battalion-level special forces training, assigning officers to each other's armed services, and standardising equipment and operational doctrine. The two countries also operate several joint-defence facilities in Australia, mainly ground stations for spy satellite, and signals intelligence espionage in Southeast and East Asia as part of the ECHELON network.
During the 2010s, New Zealand and the US resumed a close relationship, although it is unclear whether the revived partnership falls under the aegis of the 1951 trilateral treaty. The Wellington Declaration of 2010 defined a "strategic partnership" between New Zealand and the US, and New Zealand joined the biennial Rim of the Pacific military exercise off Hawaii in 2012, for the first time since 1984. The US prohibition on New Zealand ships making port at US bases was lifted after the 2012 exercise.[8]