At the heart of south-east Asia’s problems with Australia in the late 1990s and early 2000s were two beliefs: that Australian policy was too focused on the United States, at the expense of the region, and that the alliance – and Australian strategic policy more generally – were targeted at the region.
Today these concerns have eased. When in 2011 Julia Gillard announced the troop rotation of US marines in Darwin, Indonesia’s initial reaction was not positive. But Jakarta’s views later became more favourable: when President Yudhoyono visited Australia in 2012, he expressed willingness to work with Australian and the US on disaster relief.
US State Department representative John Foster Dulles, flanked by the Australian and New Zealand ambassadors to the US, Sir Percy Spender, left, and Sir Carl Berendsen, at the initialling of the ANZUS Treaty in San Francisco in 1951.
