Lot 54D423
The Consultant to the Secretary (Dulles) to the Secretary of Defense (Marshall)
My Dear Mr. Secretary: In Canberra, Australia, during February 1951, with the authority of the President, and the concurrence of the Secretary of State and yourself, I negotiated a draft proposed security treaty between the United States, Australia and New Zealand, subject to review and final decision on the part of the United States Government. This draft1 I handed you on March 6, 1951.
[Page 221]On April 19 you transmitted to the Secretary of State a memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dated April 17, 1951,2 pointing out that Articles VII and VIII of the draft treaty were objectionable to them and that they desired that there be no reference of any nature in the security arrangement to military plans, planning, or organizations therefor, and that they would find serious objection to including openly in the treaty any requirement for the establishment of a military planning organization with Australia and New Zealand or for any formal military planning among the Pacific Island nations.
In the light of this expression of the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we have had further negotiations with the Australian and New Zealand Governments with reference to Articles VII and VIII, and I now enclose a draft of new text3 which the Ambassadors of Australia and New Zealand believe will be acceptable to their Governments.
Article VII of the new draft omits the reference to “subsidiary bodies” contained in the earlier text, a reference which some of your advisors felt might imply a military planning group.
Article VIII has been amended to eliminate wholly the only sentence of the earlier draft which mentioned “planning”, and the phrase in the earlier draft requiring the maintenance of the “closest possible relations” and consultation with other states in a position to further the purposes of the treaty has been deleted. Instead, this Article now merely authorizes the Council to maintain a “consultative relationship” with other states and organizations. Exercise of this authority would require not only action by the Council itself, but also concurring action by the other states or organizations in question.
It has been pointed out to the Australian and New Zealand Ambassadors that consultation would normally be through diplomatic channels, and that the United States is not now prepared to commit itself, for example, as a member of NATO or the Rio Pact or as prospective party to a security arrangement with Japan, to consultation by these associations with the tripartite Council.
The language of the treaty as now drafted reflects the view that the Council will not engage in military planning but will be a simple and compact body composed of high level personnel. As now drafted, there would be nothing in the treaty which would commit the United States in any of the ways considered objectionable by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The first four lines of the redrafted Article VIII referring to the possible “development of a more comprehensive system of regional security in the Pacific Area and the development by the United Nations of effective means to maintain international peace and security” [Page 222] have been added in deference to what seemed to be the views of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and also further to reinforce the President’s declaration of April 19, 1951 that the presently contemplated security arrangements in the Pacific are only “initial steps”.
I trust that the Department of Defense will now find this text acceptable from its standpoint. In view of developments in the Middle East, it is believed desirable that the United States be in a position promptly to indicate to Australia and New Zealand that further progress has been made along the lines of our Canberra discussions and the President’s Declaration of April 19, 1951, which stated that he had asked the Secretary of State, yourself and me to pursue further the matter of a security arrangement with Australia and New Zealand. It is, of course, understood that the Tripartite Security Treaty would come into effect only after Australia and New Zealand joined with us in the making of a satisfactory Treaty of Peace with Japan.
Respectfully yours,