Australia wants closer U.S. ties

SYDNEY, Australia -- Australia plans to seek even closer ties with the United States and take a more assertive role in the Pacific region, Prime Minister John Howard said in a major policy speech Tuesday.

Howard has worked assiduously to boost ties with the United States and sent troops to serve with the U.S.-led coalitions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Canberra's increasingly close alliance with Washington, however, has irked some Asian neighbors and drawn fire from Malaysia.

"America will grow more, not less, important to Australia as the years go by," Howard said in a speech to the Sydney Institute, an independent think tank.

Howard went out of his way before the Iraq war to explain his support for military action to President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation and one of Australia's closest neighbors.

Howard rejected the frequent claim that his decision to go to war in Iraq had damaged fragile relations with Indonesia and urged all nations to actively work together to combat terrorism.

"In the age of terrorism, retreat and isolation will not deliver security and prosperity," he said.

Howard's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, took up the same theme in a major speech last week which also sketched an assertive foreign policy that relies more on "coalitions of the willing" to solve international problems, rather than forums like the United Nations.

Both speeches come in the same week that Howard announced Australia would lead an international force of about 2,000 troops and police to restore order to the anarchic Pacific state of the Solomon Islands.

The intervention, which has the support of New Zealand and 14 other Pacific states, follows a request from the Solomon Islands government, which can no longer maintain order against criminal gangs and militias running rampage through the archipelago.

However, Howard said Tuesday that economic collapse, corruption and lawlessness threatened a number of Pacific states, and the world was looking to Australia to show regional leadership.