Quest for Reassurance

For two decades, Australia has relied on the U.S. as its chief ally in the Pacific. In recent years that tie was immensely strengthened by close personal rapport between President Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Holt. When Holt drowned in the surf off Portsea last December, much of the intuitive understanding between Washington and Canberra died with him. Holt's successor, John Grey Gorton, has been so beset by doubts about the durability of the U.S. commitment to Asia that Australia is considering a complete overhaul of its own defense and foreign policies.

Attitudes to Test. In quest of reassurance about U.S. intentions, Gorton this week flies to Washington for two days of talks with Lyndon John son, whom he met only at Holt's funeral. Johnson and the men around him will certainly try to allay Gorton's fears. They feel that Australia's 19th Prime Minister, a comparative novice in world affairs, may have read too much significance into U.S. election-year oratory--notably Bobby Kennedy's and Eugene McCarthy's dovish stand against further Asian involvement. Still, Gorton intends to test the candidates' attitudes for himself; before he returns home, he expects to have private talks with all the U.S. presidential aspirants.

Australia fears that its own position would be badly compromised if the U.S. were to fold the protective military umbrella it holds over Southeast Asia. Since World War II, it has based its defense on joint efforts with the U.S. and Britain to halt the spread of Communism on the Asian mainland.

Thus, the Australians fought in Korea, helped to crush Communist insurgents in Malaya in the late '50s and have sent 8,500 men to fight alongside U.S. troops in South Viet Nam.

Though the Aussies show no sign of pulling out of Viet Nam, Gorton has begun to have doubts about Australia's role. He has grumbled about the country's rising defense costs (currently $1.2 billion a year, or 5% of the gross national product). That is only half the rate of U.S. defense spending. But Conservative Gorton cannot easily ignore Australia's long tradition of small military budgets--or the Labor Party opposition dedicated to keeping them that way. Gorton has also expressed misgivings about spending some $250 million for 24 of the U.S.'s controversial F-111 fighter-bombers ordered by Holt's predecessor, Sir Robert Menzies.

For the longer run, he questions whether his comparatively small (pop. 12 million) country can afford to maintain any military presence at all in Asia unless joined by powerful allies, including the U.S. Despite pressure from his own Cabinet, Gorton has so far refused to commit his government to keep forces in Malaysia after the British withdraw in 1971. "Our traditional concept of forward defense," he said recently, "may have to be abandoned in the not too distant future."

Like the Israelis. Instead, Gorton has talked of pulling Australian troops home and creating a mobile "Israeli-type" citizens' army ready to leap into action anywhere in Southeast Asia on short notice. Washington considers such a "fortress Australia" policy a serious mistake, arguing that it would fail to meet Australia's defense needs while alienating the country's Asian neighbors, who depend on Australia's overseas garrisons, small though they are, to keep order. So far, the fortress concept remains only an idea in Gorton's mind. Washington hopes to convince him that, whatever happens in Viet Nam and whoever is elected President, the U.S. can scarcely afford to back away from either its network of alliances or its military deployment in Asia.

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