Britain's Gordon Brown: a change in tone for US
Britain focuses on how the heir apparent to Prime Minister Tony Blair may affect transatlantic ties.
from the March 5, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
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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