| Summary/Abstract |
Unsurprisingly, most of the literature on the origins of the ANZUS alliance examines why the treaty came into existence in 1951, emphasising the role of John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s Special Representative, Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, and Percy Spender, the Australian Foreign Minister. This paper takes a different approach. It focuses on the policy priorities of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and argues that the JCS played an important, underappreciated role shaping the text and therefore the nature of the ANZUS treaty. Their coordinated intransigence within the interagency process—described by Acheson as a ‘sustained tantrum’—limited the geographic scope of ANZUS to the Pacific area and prevented Australian policymakers from gaining access to non-Pacific bodies such as NATO. Most importantly, the JCS limited the institutionalised depth of the treaty by preventing the Australian government from gaining access to the Pentagon’s global strategic planning. The policy priorities of the JCS in 1951, and their success at influencing the ANZUS agreement to reflect these priorities, holds enduring significance for the US-Australia alliance, which is simultaneously dominated by the two countries’ militaries yet hampered by underdeveloped mechanisms for policy formulation and institutionalised military cooperation.
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