Australia Looks to America:
Australian-American Relations Since Pearl Harbor

We have two purposes in writing this book.

The first and main purpose is to write a concise history of Australian-American relations, from 1941 to the present; from the dark days of Pearl Harbor to the international war on terror in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Organizing our chapters around the various historical developments—including the origins and impact of the ANZUS Treaty, a political institution now in its sixth decade—that have informed the Australian-American connection, we have focused on both the commonalities of agreement and the sharp differences over the management of the broader bilateral relationship. Historically, it is clear that politicians, policymakers, and diplomats, on both sides of the Pacific, have managed the relationship in their own interests, for their own reasons, and that neither side has given much away.

The second purpose of the book is to provide interested readers with an opportunity to confront for themselves some of the major documents that have been bases of historical interpretation during the past fifty years. Such documents have constituted the foundation of pivotal interpretations among scholars and commentators of every persuasion of the political spectrum and are, therefore, always worth a second look. Equally important, these documents, not unlike most historical documents, reveal an exceptional “explanatory” quality, not merely positions taken but the reason why they were taken.