A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
MR. HERBERT MORRISON was Foreign Secretary when—in April, 1951—Mr. Truman made the first public announcement about the ANZUS arrange- ment for a tripartite treaty which would have as its object the safeguarding of the security of The Pacific area. " It would not," he rather lamely admitted in the House of Commons, " have been unwelcome to us if we had been included in the proposed pact." To this day it remains something of a mystery why ANZUS is not ANZUKUS. The council of this body is now holding its annual meeting in Washington and is re- ported to be discussing, among other topics, the security of Malaya in the course of a general review of South East Asian defence problems. The defence of the Pacific area, whose limits are not defined in the treaty, is not an easy problem; and its difficulties are not lessened by the fact that at the moment nobody really knows whom it is being defended against —the Russia of yesterday or the Japan of tomorrow ? But if you are seriously studying military problems in the Pacific and the territories adjacent to it, it is surely a pity to exclude altogether from your deliberations the only two powers— Great Britain and France—who are actually carrying out military operations in the area : especially if one of them (Great Britain) is bound to be involved in any war which does break out there.
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