History shows that US support for its allies can't necessarily be relied on, writes Geoffrey Barker.

Barack Obama's visit to Australia next month will be an occasion for mutual backslapping over the United States-Australia security alliance as it approaches its seventieth anniversary. It should also be an occasion for Australians to ask a question often left ambiguous or unanswered in discussions about the alliance: How far could Australia rely on the United States if it was attacked?

The question has been given new relevance by the publication of The Irregulars by British journalist-author Jennet Conant, a riveting account of British efforts in the early years of the second world war to subvert American isolationism and neutrality and to draw the United States into the war on the British side. Conant's primary focus is on British diplomats and spies in Washington, notably the RAF officer and writer Roald Dahl, carrying out Churchill's orders to shift US public opinion sufficiently to allow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to supply beleaguered allied forces with the ships and planes and munitions they needed to halt Hitler's advance. It is an extraordinary story of the shenanigans (including sexual shenanigans) of Dahl, William Stephenson, Isaiah Berlin, Ian Fleming, Leslie Howard, Noel Coward and others as they mounted their intelligence operations for Churchill.

Conant does not focus primarily on US neutrality and Roosevelt's struggle with the America First movement to win Congressional support for the Lend Lease program under which the British and their allies eventually acquired American arms.

Read the full article at Inside Story: http://inside.org.au/under-the-eagles-wing/

Geoffrey Barker is a visiting fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. Inside Story is edited at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology in association with The Australian National University. Selected articles from Inside Story appear in the Forum section of the Canberra Times.