In addition, Australia hosted important American facilities on its territory. By helping to detect launches of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), these facilities played a valuable part in maintain the global intelligence vision essential to America's nuclear security.
Even the more remote parts of the South Pacific began to weigh in the global balance during the latter part of the Cold War, as Moscow exploited America's post Vietnam strategic paralysis. In the mid 1980s, anti-nuclear sentiment in New Zealand, partly a consequence of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, came to count in the global 'correlation of forces'.
New Zealand was indeed remote from the locus of global conflict, which was always Berlin. But even distant allies were important to America's ability to exploit the leverage of seapower against a continental adversary. The United States, as the leader of a global maritime coalition, needed both nuclear weapons and maritime flexibility in order to contain the Soviet Union. Moscow obviously did not think the South Pacific irrelevant, as evidenced by its support for 'peace campaigns' which targeted US nuclear weapons and maritime mobility.
Australia did not follow suit when New Zealand defected from the ANZUS alliance in 1986, after it refused to accept nuclear-capable ships in its ports. Australian political leaders understood the importance of the global balance for their own security. But they threw out some large bones to appease anti-nuclear constituencies, including support for a Southwest Pacific Nuclear-Weapons Free Zone. Unfortunately, that subsequently encouraged woolly thinking among the Southeast Asians.
New roles for the anchor
The global balance may no longer exist, but East Asia is now the focus of unresolved great power tension, centering on the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan straits and the South China Sea. Tensions arising from clashes of strategic interest in North Asia rapidly transmit themselves to Australia's area of immediate strategic interest, the archipelagos and peninsulas of maritime Southeast Asia.
Helping to preserve regional equilibrium is still vital to Australia's security. Australia welcomed the enhancement of the US-Japan alliance in 1996, recognizing the centrality of that alliance for regional stability and therefore for its own security. Australia's alliance with the United States was upgraded in the same year by means of the July 1996 Sydney Statement.
That represented another important milestone in US post Cold War commitments to East Asian security. The Sydney Statement saw an extension of agreements covering the Pine Gap defense joint facility in central Australia. Having made a vital contribution to the stability of the nuclear balance during the Cold War, the US-Australia joint facilities remain important to the security of both countries. Indeed, these facilities could acquire new roles in regional security if Japan and South Korea go ahead with Theater Missile Defenses.
