New Zealand and the genesis of the ANZUS Treaty

Abstract

The immediate post war years from 1945 until the signature of the ANZUS Treaty in 1951 were a crucial period in the development of New Zealand's foreign policy. The period saw a readjustment to altered facts of international life. This readjustment, in part conscious but to a great extent conditioned by factors outside New Zealand's control, culminated in a formal alliance with the United states which pointed a major direction of New Zealand's foreign policy for at least the next two decades. It is this readjustment to changed conditions in the Pacific and the world at large, illustrated primarily by developments towards the formal American alliance, which forms the subject of this thesis.