Origins of the Cold War
Australia's entry into the Cold War came in 1950, when it rushed combat air and sea forces into the Korean War, two days after the Americans did. The Australian Prime Minister received a hero's welcome in Washington. The ANZUS military alliance with New Zealand and the United States was signed in July 1951; it was a plan for consultation and did not involve military planning like NATO. Public opinion in Australia was intensely hostile to Japan after its wartime atrocities, but Japan was now an ally in the Cold War, so Australia's accepted the very generous soft peace treaty with Japan in 1951. Instead of worrying about a resurgent Japan, Australia now worried more about a possible Chinese threat.
Australia–New Zealand relations
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both countries or their colonial precursors were enthusiastic members of the British Empire and both either sent soldiers or permitted the sending of military volunteers to the Mahdist War in the Sudan, the quelling of the Boxer Rebellion, the Second Boer War, the First and Second World Wars and the Malayan Emergency and Konfrontasi. Independent of the sense of Empire (or Commonwealth), both nations in the second half of the twentieth century otherwise provided contingents in support of United States strategic aims in the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Gulf War. Whereas military personnel from both countries participated in UNTSO, the Multinational Force and Observers to Sinai, INTERFET to East Timor, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, UNMIS to Sudan, and more recent intervention in Tonga the New Zealand government officially condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq and stood apart from Australia in refusing to contribute any combat forces. Somewhat similarly in 1982, although without speaking in condemnation, Australia found no purpose in joining with New Zealand to support the United Kingdom in the Falklands War against Argentina just as New Zealand had declined to join Australia in Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War or in UNEF to Egypt and Israel during the 1970s.