Gordon Brown in America

Critics of Gordon Brown — and amid sliding approval ratings and mutterings from the ranks of his own Labour Party, there are more than a few — complain that Britain's Prime Minister lacks vision. They say he's a details man — not a bad attribute in a Finance Minister, the role he occupied for just over a decade, but a weakness in a national leader whose job it is to discern and articulate the bigger picture. Yet from the Scottish home Brown has owned for more than 20 years, a solid family house with large bay windows and a sloping front garden, there's nothing but big views: great, windswept skies and a broad expanse of water spanned by two extraordinary bridges.

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Interview With Gordon Brown

The British Prime Minister talks to TIME's Michael Elliott about the state of US-British relations on the eve of his trip to the United States

The same dramatic topography inspired the 18th century economist Adam Smith, a hero of Brown's and a fellow alumnus of the local high school in Kirkcaldy, to think about the virtues of global trade. The ships Smith watched on the Firth of Forth, Brown says, carried both goods and people — Scottish emigrants leaving for the New World. "All the songs of Scotland are sad songs," Brown says, in a two-hour interview with TIME. "They're songs of departure about people who will never see each other again because they've gone to America." Brown, who is making a trip to the U.S. for meetings with President George W. Bush and the three Senators competing to succeed him, has been shaped both by the great minds of the Scottish Enlightenment, like Smith, and by a long engagement with the country that lured away so many of his compatriots. "I love the States," he says. When asked if he agrees with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner's recent statement to the International Herald Tribune that the U.S.'s "magic is over," Brown demurs. "America," he says, "is still a beacon to the world for its defense of liberty and support for individual opportunity."

Whatever his critics may say, Brown does have a vision. He sees the earth at a tipping point, full of fresh opportunities to eradicate poverty and promote social justice, yet fraught with looming dangers as its peoples struggle to adapt to globalization, technological advances and climate change. But there are those who think that Brown, buffeted by dissent and blindsided by serial mishaps, could soon be forced into singing his own sad song of departure. And the medicine he's proposing for the international community — a reinvigorated multilateralism, in which nations work together through institutions like the United Nations, NATO, the IMF and the World Bank, coupled with radical reform of those bodies to make them fit for 21st century purposes — isn't simple to explain. Or sexy.

Waiting for the President
There's the rub. If he is to fulfill his ambitious agenda, Brown will have to master the one skill he has never perfected: the ability to communicate and persuade. In his defense, he can claim bad luck: he followed into office Tony Blair, at his best one of 
 the most pitch-perfect masters of the black arts of political persuasion ever seen. But after a rocky few months, some Labour Party activists, worried about their prospects at the next election (which doesn't have to be held until 2010), openly wonder whether Brown's long time in Blair's shadow has truly prepared him for the top job. Seen through that prism, his U.S. trip and other such international fixtures are a test he cannot afford to flunk.

If recent realignments in foreign relations have seemed substantial — France's new engagement with the U.S.; musical chairs in the Kremlin; the Shi'a revival; the defeat of Australia's long-serving Prime Minister John Howard; indeed, the departure in June last year of Blair — none of them match the seismic shift expected on Nov. 4. Despite the growing power of China and India and a resurgent Russia, the election of a new U.S. President is still the biggest event in the international political calendar.

The problem for Brown is how to position himself to take advantage of that change. "A lot depends on the mood after the Inauguration, as to whether the new U.S. Administration will want to be connecting to the multilateralist argument, in which case Brown will be in the right place," says Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Labour-affiliated think tank the Fabian Society.

Brown is fascinated by the American election campaign but careful not to betray any partiality (his U.S. meetings with the candidates are scheduled, with studied neutrality, to last 45 minutes apiece). Though instinctively a supporter of the Democrats, his free-trade instincts clash with the populist protectionism that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are voicing on the stump. He recently welcomed John McCain to Downing Street. Brown's verdict on the Arizona Senator and Republican candidate for the White House: "He's good company."

A frequent cavil against Brown is that he is not. Brown often vacations in the U.S., but one suspects that it is not the fun and froth of American culture that draws him there so much as earnest policy discussions during summer conferences at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. A colleague says Brown has a huge appetite for American history and politics, routinely stocking up in bookstores on Washington's Dupont Circle. (Though a man of the left, Brown has broad tastes: a bathroom in his house contains a well-thumbed copy of Moral Judgment, by James Q. Wilson, a favorite of U.S. conservatives.) In private, he can be delightful company. Australian novelist Kathy Lette says "there's a loving, frivolous side of him," and describes a surprise party Brown organized for his wife Sarah that started with Lette and other female friends including J.K. Rowling hiding, giggling, behind Downing Street's formal furnishings. But as a scion of his nation's Calvinist tradition and the son of a Church of Scotland Minister, Brown grew up marinated in duty — which has perhaps contributed to the dour image the British press has long bestowed on him.

Dark Suits, Buttoned Up
Give or take the odd photo opportunity, such as a recent kickabout with French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Arsenal soccer stadium in London, Brown's lighter side is seldom on display when he meets foreign leaders. "Tony Blair and President Sarkozy are personal friends," says an adviser to the French President. "Sarkozy's relationship with Brown is as warm and positive as it was with Blair in terms of foreign policy and European issues, but it lacks the personal friendship." Brown's joint press conference with Bush at Camp David last July was a study in embarrassment, as Bush's homespun joviality bounced off the dark-suited, buttoned-up Scot.

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