Invoking John Curtin’s famous Melbourne Herald article declaring Australia looked to America as Japanese forces swept south, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s speech delivered on Saturday adroitly positions Australia for a testing time in foreign policy. Visiting China later this week, and with President Donald Trump’s tariff demands becoming more truculent as a new 1 August deadline approaches, Albanese’s speech affirms that in the competition between the United States and China, Australia will act in its own interests.
Though often interpreted only as a plea for American help in the war against Japan, Curtin’s 27 December 1941 article was indeed also and more importantly an assertion of Australian independence in foreign and defence policy. As Albanese rightly said: “Curtin’s famous statement that Australia ‘looked to America’ was much more than the idea of trading one strategic guarantor for another.”
The context of the 1941 article by Curtin was not American participation in the war against Japan. America, after all, had been attacked by Japan three weeks earlier. Nor was it the willingness of the United States to defend Australia. That had already been signalled by Roosevelt. Nor was it the release of Australian troops in the Middle East to join the Pacific war. That had been suggested by Churchill shortly before.
Albanese also has in mind a context, also unspoken. This includes not only the US imposition of tariffs on Australian imports, in violation of the bilateral free trade agreement, but also what has been interpreted as an American demand that its military allies increase defence spending.
The context was the meeting then taking place in Washington between Churchill and Roosevelt. The leaders were discussing the allied response to Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbour and British territories in Asia. Churchill’s objective in those talks was to ensure America was not distracted by the war in the Pacific. He wanted reaffirmation of the Germany First understanding already reached between the UK and the United States. On that point he was reassured, not least because it was Roosevelt’s policy as much as his own.
Aware of the general idea of Germany First and the subordinate status of the Pacific War in allied planning, concerned that Australia was not part of these conversations, Curtin was determined that Australia be heard by the two allied leaders. He was also better informed than either Churchill or Roosevelt of the looming military disaster in Malaya. Disputing earlier British assessments he judged the Japanese “a powerful, ably led and unbelievably courageous foe”.
Curtin’s article was a demand for Australia – not the United Kingdom – to be America’s principal partner in the war against Japan. As he wrote, Australia refused to accept “the subordinate status” of the Pacific war, and insisted that formulation of strategy for the Pacific war should be “primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say”, a claim that notably excluded the United Kingdom. It was a wildly ambitious demand – though Australia became more significant to the United States as Japan conquered British and Dutch possessions in Asia. Australia then remained as a useful America ally in the south Pacific, while the United Kingdom was left with no serious role in the Pacific war other than to resist any diversion of forces from the war against Germany.
Referencing Curtin, Albanese said during his speech on Saturday that Australians have “the confidence and determination to think and act for ourselves. To follow our own course and shape our own future”. In this declaration Albanese also has in mind a context, also unspoken. This includes not only the US imposition of tariffs on Australian imports, in violation of the bilateral free trade agreement, but also what has been interpreted as an American demand that its military allies increase defence spending. More broadly there is a suggestion from this administration that friends of America should not also be friends of China, and that they should diminish their economic engagement with China. The Albanese government has shown little interest in these propositions. Nor did the Morrison government which preceded it.
Albanese also pointedly referenced the post war planning policies of the Curtin and Chifley government, focused as External Affairs minister Herbert V. Evatt proclaimed, on the rights of small and medium powers in a rules-based order. In a world of increasing competition between the two great powers, Evatt’s work was worth recalling.
John Edwards is author of John Curtin's War, Volumes I and II, published by Penguin.
