Diplomacy: Whispering Sweet Nothings

Australia's Prime Minister makes a friend in the White House

The scene is familiar. Ronald Reagan and a visiting foreign dignitary step before cameras and microphones on the White House lawn and try to look as if, despite the policy differences separating their countries, the two have really become fast friends. Only this time, by all accounts, the feeling was genuine. "The President and Prime Minister hit it off," said a senior Administration official after Australia's Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke emerged from a two-hour chat with Reagan last week. The personal rapport was evident when the two men appeared together afterward. Said Reagan: "We had a productive session and, more importantly, we've had a chance to put our relationship on a personal basis. We have much in common." Indeed, the meeting was so successful that Hawke felt compelled to reassure Australians that he had not become a Reaganite. Said Hawke: "Just because you saw me on the front page whispering sweet nothings in Ronald's ear, you shouldn't assume that means an identity of view on all things."

Hawke and Reagan found themselves on common ground from the outset. Both, for instance, spoke warmly of their days as union leaders. The Prime Minister, who headed the Australian Council of Trade Unions for ten years, and the President, onetime chief of the U.S. Screen Actors Guild, agreed that one of their biggest union problems had been opposition from obstreperous left-wing members. More substantively, Hawke assured Reagan, along with Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, that he did not consider himself bound by the rigid foreign policy planks favored by the left wing of his Labor Party. Those planks call for, among other policies, an end to Australia's military aid to Indonesia and resumption of aid to Viet Nam. Indeed, Hawke's main purpose in coming to Washington was clearly to reaffirm the close political and security links that have governed relations between the U.S. and Australia for decades. He also wanted to impress upon Reagan the extent to which Australia's recovery from its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression depends on U.S. economic policy. He apparently succeeded. Said a U.S. business leader: "He's deft, tough and a man of considerable substance. He's a man you can do business with."

Hawke's ten-day stopover in North America came near the end of a 25,000-mile, 19-day world tour that took him to Port Moresby, Jakarta, London, Paris and Geneva before he arrived in Washington. On the final leg of the trip, Hawke strongly reiterated Australia's commitment to the 1951 Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty for the defense of the Pacific. He pledged that there is no country that the U.S. "will be able to rely on more than Australia." In a speech before Washington's National Press Club, Hawke added: "Australia is not and cannot be a nonaligned nation. We are neutral neither in thought nor action. We are linked with the U.S. by a whole range of common interests, attitudes, aspirations, institutions and perceptions."