Australia's relations with Iran and the Australia-US Alliance, 1979-2005

Abstract

Australia has been a close ally of the US for over five decades. Strategic alignment with Washington has been, and remains, a central tenet of Australian strategic thinking and the US alliance continues to serve as an ideational framework for the formulation of Australian foreign policy. In contrast, Australia's relations with Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution have been at the lower end of the scale of importance, and based principally upon a trade relationship that has been dominated by the export of Australian agricultural commodities. Considered together, these two very different international relationships present an interesting problem, on two levels, for the study of Australian foreign policy.

First, the extreme animosity between Washington and Tehran highlights a particular problem for Australian foreign policy-how to manage a potential clash of interests with a superpower ally. Second, the Australia-Iran relationship has been dominated by trade interests, while Canberra's interests in supporting the US alliance are predominantly strategic. Thus, the foreign policy challenges that have at times arisen because of Australia's relations with Iran in the context of the US alliance reflect the problem of balancing trade and strategic interests in Australian foreign policy.

For most of the period between 1979 and 2005 Australia has managed these two relationships through a policy of non-linkage between strategic and international trade interests. This thesis presents an analytical framework that explains Australian policies of non-linkage in terms of the impact of domestic political dynamics on the foreign policy formulation process. The framework employs the concept of an issue area to analyse how domestic political and economic interests coalesce around specific foreign policy concerns, and demonstrates that the interaction between interests associated with strategic and international trade issue areas has determined whether Australia pursues policies of linkage or non-linkage with respect to its relations with Iran and the US.

This thesis contributes to the study of Australian foreign policy by offering a framework that: 1) organises the plurality of foreign policy interests in the domestic political domain into issue areas, 2) explains the domestic political dynamics that determine the capacity of each issue area to shape the formulation of foreign policy within Cabinet. It contributes to the broader field of Foreign Policy Analysis by demonstrating that the application of issue area analysis provides new perspectives on, and insights into, the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy. Show more