"Operationalising the Australia–New Zealand Alliance: ANZAC 2035," the statement Canberra and Wellington signed in March, offers a template for turning treaty language into ten years of practical cooperation — and it is precisely that practical work that observers now say Australia should pursue with the United States as ANZUS marks its 75th year on 1 September.
Three dimensions of Australian deterrence
The argument at the centre of the discussion is straightforward and explicit in recent Australian guidance: deterrence for Australia operates across three distinct but increasingly overlapping dimensions — self-reliant deterrence, regional collective deterrence, and US extended deterrence. The 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) links increased self-reliance to Australia's ability to employ and sustain credible military power in a crisis or conflict, including when allied support may be limited. Collective deterrence brings Australian capability together with that of the United States and other partners through geography, intelligence, joint facilities, interoperable forces and logistics. And, as the NDS puts it, Australia regards US extended nuclear deterrence as the "best protection against the increasing risk of nuclear escalation."
ANZAC 2035 as a near-term blueprint
The Canberra–Wellington statement, titled ANZAC 2035, provides a concrete example of how alliances can convert political commitments into operational plans. The document establishes a ten-year framework to operationalise the Australia–New Zealand alliance through greater force integration, posture cooperation, combined planning and exercises, and links those efforts explicitly to regional security, crisis response and collective deterrence. The source holds up ANZAC 2035 as evidence that Australia is already applying the logic of institutionalising cooperative deterrence with close partners.
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End the scrambleLessons from other US alliances: roles, mechanisms and exercises
Allies in the Indo‑Pacific already use bilateral Defence Guidelines to make treaty commitments operational. The 2015 Guidelines for Japan–US Defense Cooperation, for example, create an overarching framework for cooperation in peacetime and conflict and establish an Alliance Coordination Mechanism to support common situational awareness, information sharing and coordinated responses — including flexible deterrent options and de‑escalatory actions — while retaining separate national chains of command. The US–Republic of Korea Guidelines connect combined defence to operational planning, intelligence sharing, interoperability and exercises, and institutionalise extended‑deterrence consultation. The 2023 US–Philippines Bilateral Defense Guidelines explicitly seek to "modernize and strengthen" the alliance by establishing common understandings of roles, missions and capabilities; strengthening bilateral planning; and coordinating capability development to increase combined capacity to resist coercion and deter aggression. In each case the practical effect is to identify responsibilities, authorities, logistics and coordination arrangements before a crisis begins.
What Australia–US Defence Guidelines would aim to solve
The source recommends that Australia and the United States use ANZUS's 75th anniversary to consider bilateral Defence Guidelines as the next evolution of the alliance. Such guidelines would not replace nor reinterpret ANZUS, and they would not predetermine Australian participation in future contingencies. Instead, they would modernise implementation by translating the three deterrence dimensions into concrete cooperation on roles and missions, capability development, bilateral planning and crisis coordination. That work would also address an increasingly salient conventional–nuclear connection: in a regional conflict Australia could be simultaneously generating its own deterrent effects, contributing to collective deterrence and relying on US extended nuclear deterrence, while nuclear coercion or strategic signalling could directly affect Australian options, decisions and operations. The proposed guidelines would therefore strengthen the alliance's institutional machinery in ways intended to enhance credible collective deterrence and defence.
What this means for Australian defence planners, US alliance managers, and New Zealand (Wellington)
- Australian defence planners: use the Defence Guidelines concept to align self‑reliant capability development with combined operational planning and logistics so that domestic investments contribute clearly to collective deterrence.
- US alliance managers: apply lessons from Japan, the Republic of Korea and the Philippines by establishing coordination mechanisms, situational awareness tools and pre‑agreed authorities that preserve separate chains of command while enabling coordinated responses.
- New Zealand (Wellington): ANZAC 2035 demonstrates a template for operationalising bilateral ties through posture cooperation and combined exercises — a model that Canberra suggests could be echoed in Australia–US arrangements without reviving trilateral ANZUS structures.
ANZUS at 75 is less a moment for nostalgia than a practical opportunity. The core proposition in the source is that Defence Guidelines would institutionalise cooperation already underway, make the overlapping dimensions of deterrence more coherent, and do so without renegotiating treaty commitments. Whether Canberra and Washington will translate that proposition into formal guidelines is the immediate policy decision the anniversary spotlights.
