Britain's Gordon Brown: a change in tone for US

"He'll be much tougher on America than Blair was," predicts Ian Gibson, a Labour parliamentarian, who, like Brown, charted a course from provincial Scotland through Edinburgh University and on to national politics. "But he has a great interest in some of the good things in America," he adds, noting that Brown is more at ease among intellectuals than among defense and institutional types in Washington. "He's more pro-America than pro-Europe in fact."

Indeed, Europeans may be dreading the prospect of a Brown premiership. While Blair aimed to haul Britain into the heart of Europe, the chancellor has given few signs of being a Europhile over the past 10 years and, apart from brief appearances at meetings, rarely visits the continent.

On Iraq, few expect a sudden change. Blair has already started the countdown to exit with the announcement on Feb. 21 of a drawdown in troops. Brown will, experts say, want to draw a line in the sand. And he may change the tune about the war, because he was far less convinced than Blair about it.

"He doesn't suggest, like Blair does, that the war in Iraq was part of the fight against terrorism," says John Curtice, a politics professor at Strathclyde University in Scotland. "He has said as little as possible on Iraq, but has said enough to suggest that he won't give speeches implying that the war in Iraq contributed to reducing terrorism in the UK."

Mr. Curtice says Brown's main aim would be to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible. "The other question is will he be willing to say we made a mistake?" he adds.

Afghanistan is a different matter. Here Brown looks to be locked into current policy. The defense ministry has just announced another rise in troop numbers, to 7,700, and the campaign in the south is viewed very differently from Iraq. "Here, he can't avoid a commitment," warns Professor George Joffe, a Middle East expert at the Center for International Studies at Cambridge University. "But he will do so at the expense of Iraq."

While Blair's foreign policy has centered around active interventionism – the idea that the West has a moral duty to intervene militarily where it sees gross injustice – Brown's big ideas are different, though equally predicated on morality. "He clearly has a passion about Africa; issues around aid, debt relief, and trade justice," notes Twigg. But whether he backs away from moral interventionism remains to be seen. "The situation in Darfur will provide a major test" of that.

Brown has already started behaving like a prime minister. In speeches now, he strays well off the financial beat, positing ideas and policies on everything from Britishness and immigration to Britain's chances of hosting the 2018 soccer World Cup.

Allies say he will focus more on higher education, science, technology, and engineering. The need to stiffen economic competition against developing countries like India is a favored theme.

But some fret that a Brown premiership does not promise enough domestic change to revive a party suffering in the polls. Brown was, after all, the architect of many of Labour's reforms over the past decade.

As Frank Field, a former minister, wrote last week: "What new directions can be offered when the architect of current policies has merely moved up one place?"

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