America: The Cost Of Alliance

The treaties signed at the start of the Cold War are strong bonds. The ANZUS Treaty of 1951 was a formal expression of Australia's dependence on the US for protection and has been a central element of Australian defence and foreign policy ever since. All Australian governments for 60 years have, as Don Watson comments wryly, "thought it wise to be friends with them". The view that shared values provide a strong basis for the alliance is misleading. There are similarities — of language, ethnicity and political institutions — but even those are declining. Perhaps the Howard Government's claim of "shared values" is simply a less explicit way of noting the extent to which it has copied the market-fundamentalist economic ideology and complied with the neo-conservative foreign policies of the Bush Administration. http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/america-the-cost-of-alliance/2006/01/08/1136655083334.html

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