Alliances Big Flap Down Under

By William E. Smith.

The first foreign policy dispute of the second Reagan Administration bubbled to the surface last week from two improbable spots: New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, Australia. What had begun last year as a policy by New Zealand's new Labor government to establish the country as a nuclear-free zone was suddenly transformed into a threat to the 33-year-old ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand, U.S.) defense pact between Washington and its longtime allies in the South Pacific.

The trouble dates from last July, after New Zealand's new Prime Minister, David Lange, 42, led his Labor Party to victory with, among other promises, the intent to ban port calls by nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed vessels. The proscription applied to all foreign shipping, but it really meant U.S. naval vessels. At first it appeared that the matter could be compromised or finessed without great difficulty. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz told Lange in Wellington last July that the U.S. would refrain from sending any naval vessels to New Zealand ports for six months or more. According to U.S. officials, the New Zealanders in turn assured the Americans that the problem could be settled to everyone's satisfaction by then.

It did not work out that way. Shultz was convinced that Lange's frequently stated intention of remaining within ANZUS meant that the Prime Minister would find a solution. After all, Lange had told Shultz that he endorsed a U.S.-New Zealand communique signed by the previous New Zealand government. The statement affirmed that "defense cooperation, including combined exercises, visits and logistical support arrangements, plays an essential part in promoting mutual security." Instead of rebuffing his party's antinuclear wing, however, it soon became apparent that Lange was siding with it. In late December, the U.S. sent a blanket request to New Zealand for port visits required by U.S. vessels in 1985. Lange replied that he preferred to deal with such matters on a case-by-case basis. To U.S. policymakers, that suggested that the Prime Minister had painted himself into a corner and did not know how to get out of it.

Finally, on Jan. 21, deliberately seeking a confrontation, the Reagan Administration sent a routine request to Wellington asking for permission for the U.S.S. Buchanan, a destroyer, to call at a New Zealand port during the ANZUS military exercise, named Sea Eagle, planned for March. The Buchanan is a conventionally powered vessel, but since the U.S. refuses, by long-standing policy, to state whether a particular ship is or is not carrying nuclear weapons, the New Zealand ban effectively applied to it.

Frustrated that quiet diplomacy had failed to bring Lange around, the U.S. decided to try public pressure. It might have known that this would be counterproductive. Several weeks ago, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke had written to Lange urging him, in effect, to moderate his antinuclear position. Hawke had faced a similar threat from antinuclear forces within his own Australian Labor Party but had managed to stave off efforts to prevent U.S. Navy ships from visiting Australian ports. If the U.S. considered Hawke's letter to Lange to be a "forthright expression" of Australia's support for ANZUS, many New Zealanders tended to see it as meddling by a neighboring country they sometimes regard as a bullying older brother.

That displeasure was nothing compared with Lange's response to Washington's request last week. Even before the official reply had arrived, the State Department declared that a "definitive" rejection of the U.S. request "would be a matter of grave concern that goes to the core of our mutual obligations as allies." The U.S. would "reconsider" its participation in the March military exercise and would "have to consider the implications for overall cooperation with New Zealand in ANZUS."

As Washington by now expected, Lange rejected the request. He explained that the Buchanan was not welcome in New Zealand because the U.S. would not guarantee that it did not have nuclear weapons on board. Washington retaliated by canceling its participation in Sea Eagle and declaring that antinuclear movements seeking to "diminish defense cooperation" should know "that the course these movements advocate will not be cost-free in terms of security relationships with the U.S." In the U.S. view, an important principle was at stake: the right to use an ally's military facilities.

With that, Lange charged that the U.S. was "bullying" a small and friendly ally. Said he: "I regard it as unacceptable that another country should by threat or coercion try to change a policy that has been embraced by the New Zealand people."

Even as the U.S. was trying to find a way out of the impasse, it received a second jolt to its defense posture in the South Pacific. Australia's Hawke, arriving in Washington on a previously arranged visit, told the Administration that because of strong opposition in his party, he would have to renege on an earlier promise to allow U.S. planes to use an Australian staging base to monitor the testing of the MX missile later this year. Seeking to defuse the matter, Shultz announced later that the U.S. had decided to oversee the testing of its newest intercontinental ballistic missile, which will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to a target area in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, "without the use of Australian support arrangements."

The Administration, seeking to protect its basic rights as an ally, came down hard on New Zealand. But Washington felt that it could accommodate Australia without damaging ANZUS. The two developments underscored the pressures that have been building in one of the "safest" corners of the world. The U.S., Australia and New Zealand were friends and allies long before they made their relationship formal by signing the ANZUS treaty in 1951. They had fought together in World War II; it was widely accepted that Australia and New Zealand had been saved from a Japanese invasion by the U.S. victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942. In the postwar era, two-way trade has flourished, and the U.S. has extended preferences to such exports from Australia and New Zealand as lamb, wool and butter. Close military cooperation has been the norm, in everything from the standardization of equipment to regular joint exercises. Australia, in particular, has been extremely helpful to U.S. intelligence gathering, providing satellite-listening stations and other facilities.

For the U.S., the ANZUS pact has been a vital part of its global defense obligations. For Australia and New Zealand, the treaty has provided a measure of protection under the U.S. nuclear shield--even if external threats to life and freedom have seemed remote in the South Pacific. The U.S. is specifically concerned about the growth of the Soviet Union's blue-water navy, pointing to increasing Soviet use of facilities at Cam Ranh Bay, once the main U.S. military complex and naval base in Viet Nam. Says a U.S. official: "We are facing a real problem of Soviet penetration."

It is apparent that most Australians and New Zealanders do not take that threat as seriously as Washington does. In the past five years, antinuclear movements have made headway in both countries. In Australia, Hawke has managed to contain the antinuclear demands of left-wing Laborites without compromising Australia's defense commitments, even though he has come under fire for not consulting enough with his party's caucus--especially in recent days over the MX issue. In New Zealand, Lange seems determined to fulfill his campaign pledge of denying access to nuclear ships.

To a large extent, the issue is symbolic. Last year only one U.S. nuclear- powered vessel called in New Zealand; it would be relatively easy for the U.S. to send nothing but conventionally powered vessels to that country for the time being. But the key issue is whether they are nuclear-armed, and with that in mind, the Administration maintains that partners in a defense pact have no business imposing restrictions on one another. Says a senior Administration official: "Naval forces and their needs are as central to ANZUS as ground forces in Germany are central to NATO."

Moreover, U.S. policymakers are worried about the strides of antinuclear movements elsewhere. Japan officially forbids the entry of nuclear weapons into its ports but does not insist in practice that the policy be scrupulously followed. Beyond that, the U.S. fears that New Zealand's stand could refuel the antinuclear movement in Western Europe, where West German, British, Dutch and Belgian activists are trying to bar the continued deployment of U.S. medium-range cruise and Pershing II missiles.

The result has been a series of U.S. threats, both explicit and implied, to suspend military cooperation with New Zealand if Lange refuses to give in. Such an approach may raise hackles Down Under even more. New Zealanders resent any kind of pressure, from Australia or the U.S.; Australians are only slightly less sensitive to strong-arm tactics, wherever they may come from. New Zealanders are divided in the current national debate. Recent polls show that while 58% of the New Zealand population of 3.2 million opposes visits by nuclear-armed warships, 59% would not be troubled by calls by ships that are merely nuclear-powered and 60% would like the country to remain in ANZUS. But since Lange has the general support of 70% of his countrymen, the U.S. might have a lot to lose by trying to turn the screws too tightly.

With reporting by John Dunn/Melbourne and Johanna McGeary/Washington