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Australia is now comfortable with its place at the crossroads between East and West, Prime Minister John Howard said on Friday, describing his country as "an outcrop of Western civilisation" in the Asia-Pacific.
In an interview to mark his 10 years in power on March 2, Howard defended his decision to gear his foreign policy more towards traditional links to the United States, Britain and Europe, while maintaining strong relationships with Asia.
"We are an outcrop of Western civilisation, we are geographically in the Asia-Pacific region, we have very close links with North America," Howard said.
The conservative Howard has put the defence alliance with the United States at the centre of Australia's strategic outlook, which he says has rebalanced national foreign policy.
Howard invoked Australia's 55-year-old ANZUS defence alliance
with the United States for the first time in 2001 when he committed
Australian forces to the invasion of
Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the United
States.
The alliance, which also includes New Zealand as an inactive member, commits each country to come to the other's aid if one of them is attacked. Australia has since also joined the US-led "coalition of the willing" in Iraq.
Some critics in the region have suggested scornfully that Howard is President George W. Bush's "deputy sheriff" in Asia. Howard said on Friday Australia was no mere mouthpiece for the United States in Asia.
"We can be a full participant, a good friend, a dependable regional mate," he said, speaking in Melbourne's 19th century stone Treasury buildings in between anniversary events.
Howard's predecessor, Paul Keating, who favoured scrapping the monarchy and turning Australia into a republic, had sought to futher integrate the country with Asia and to distance it from its historical relationship with Britain.
Howard had argued that Australians should not try to make themselves something that they were not and promised to make Australia more "relaxed and comfortable" about its place in the world.
"What I've tried to do has been in no way to downgrade our relations with Asia, rather to further improve them, but to bring back to proper perspective our relations with the United States, Britain, other European countries," he said.
At the same time, Canberra has strengthened ties with Indonesia, its closest Asian neighbour to the north, after a low in 1999 when Australian forces led a UN peacekeeping mission into East Timor after the island broke away from Indonesia.
Howard said Canberra's response to the deadly tsunami on Dec.
26, 2004, with a
A$1 billion ($740 million) aid donation to help Indonesia rebuild
the devastated province of Aceh, proved what a constructive role
Australia could play.
He strongly denied that Australia had become a more militaristic country under his leadership.
"We haven't set out to be involved in military operations for their own sake, certainly not," he said. "This is not a militaristic country. Quite the reverse."
"But the circumstances have arisen that have required countries
to take a stand," he said. "We are a peace-loving country. We have
never sought to impose our will on other people."
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