Australia's Gulf War Commitment 1990-91

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject Politics - Region: Other States, grade: 1, Macquarie University, language: English, abstract: When the Australian Labor government announced the deployment of a naval contingent to the Persian Gulf on the 10th August 1990, Prime Minister Bob Hawke described the commitment as being "e;proportionate to the interests we have at stake"e; . What Hawke refers to in his statement is the importance of national interests in the formulation of foreign policy and a country's reaction to world events such as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. This paper will analyse to which extent the Prime Minister s claim to have acted in and proportionate to the national interest is true. In order to be in a position to answer this question, one has to agree on a definition of the term national interest .