Gordon Brown in America

By CATHERINE MAYER/NORTH QUEENSFERRY

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.

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.

To an extent, that was just what the British public wanted to see. Blair's closeness to Bush, and before that to Bill Clinton, never quite won him the influence he expected -- Blair "massively overstated the importance of personal charisma and personal connections," says Katwala -- and Britons became disenchanted with their then leader precisely because of this closeness and the sulfurous taint of the Anglo-American alliance on Iraq. Katwala maintains that Brown's businesslike approach to foreign leaders is in tune with the times. Denis MacShane, a former Labour Foreign Office Minister, echoes the point: "Brown wants respectful state-to-state relations with tricky countries like Russia and China, but he's not getting into that schmoozy clinking of beer glasses in the best Tony way."

Relations between Russia and Britain remain chilly since the 2006 murder in London of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, but there are signs that China is warming to Brown. He speaks regularly to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, has offered to help facilitate dialogue with the Dalai Lama, and is also lobbying the Chinese to put pressure on Sudan to accept the deployment of peacekeepers in Darfur.

Feng Zhongping of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations says Brown is "building trust with the Chinese leaders. He thinks China will play a favorable role [in its relations with] Britain in the age of globalization. This opinion sets him apart from other European leaders." The Prime Minister dismisses reports that he entertained any thoughts of boycotting the Beijing Olympics in protest over China's crackdown in Tibet. He always intended, he says, to miss the opening celebrations but to attend the closing ceremonies, where the mantle of the Olympics will be passed on to London, which will host the summer games in 2012. Brown's instinct is for greater engagement with China. "It's in America's interests as well as Europe's to reform our international institutions now. China is knocking on the door to be part of the international institutions," he says. "As China and India become more important, we will lose the moment at which we can persuade them that it's really in everybody's interests to be part of a reformed international system."

Brown's low-key style of advocacy on such issues, however, has done him little good at home. He is battling splits within his party and is braced for an electoral mauling in civic and mayoral elections on May 1. A poll for the Sunday Times newspaper, published on April 13, put support for the Conservative opposition at 44% to Labour's 28% and showed that Brown's personal ratings have plummeted.

He doesn't have to test these findings in parliamentary elections anytime soon. But there's talk in Westminster of a plot to oust Brown, and there's a swell of open hostility toward him in the British media. Last fall, he flirted with calling a snap poll to win a new mandate in his own right -- a gambit that proved disastrous when he balked at holding elections in the face of an upswing in support for the Conservative opposition. Another well-polished asset, Brown's reputation for sound economic stewardship, has become ever more tarnished as Britain's economy takes hits from the worldwide financial turbulence triggered by the U.S. credit crisis. It's hard to sell high-flown ideas of multilateralism or promote increases in aid to the world's poorest when your own people see the value of their homes and stocks sinking and the price of food and fuel rising.

That hasn't deterred Brown from pressing on. The impact of the global credit crunch has sharpened his thinking on multilateralism. Brown believes there are four issues in the world today that can only be addressed collectively, cooperatively and through international institutions. "We have global financial flows, but we do not have any form of early-warning system for the world economy," he says. "We have environmental catastrophe, but we have no capacity to plan, finance and act globally. We have failed states and terrorism but we've got no organizational ability to deal with reconstruction, stability, peacekeeping and humanitarian work. And we've got a growing popular participation in the big issues of the day, but we don't have any forum for dialogue that even brings the different faiths of the world together."

There's not one thing wrong with that analysis, but it doesn't exactly lend itself to snappy slogans. "That sounds a bit academic, doesn't it?," said Brown after a long explanation of how voters in Kirkcaldy or New Jersey might be convinced of the importance of reforming international institutions. And those voters who do grasp the issues might well ask why Brown places trust in the ability of large numbers of nations to reach agreement on contentious matters. For all his faith in the power of multilateralism, Brown dislikes the protracted meetings that are at the heart of any international action, says Stephen Wall, a former government official who advised Blair on the European Union. Wall remembers that Brown "found the whole business of multilateral negotiations tiresome."

Poverty and Piety Long periods at the negotiating table dampened Brown's early enthusiasm for the E.U., just as his growing feel for globalization shifted his focus further afield. But he adheres to one core priority that predates not only his time in government but his years as a brilliant academic -- Brown entered university when he was just 16 and took a first-class degree -- and as a rising Labour star.

As a child, Brown internalized the values of his father, who used his pulpit to combat poverty among his parishioners and support missionary work overseas. Brown has consistently advocated a bigger aid budget, fairer trading regimes for developing countries, and a commitment to the UN's Millennium Development Goals. Long involved with Africa, he is particularly exercised about the crisis in Zimbabwe, where his father, who died in 1998, had friends who opposed white minority rule. Though plainly outraged by the delay in announcing the result of the presidential vote in Zimbabwe, Brown seems keen to avoid any accusations of colonial-style interference. "These problems are going to be solved in Africa," he says, and then adds, "everybody in the world must stand up for democratic rights."

Such piety wins Brown little credit in the endemically cynical London media and political village. It may go down better in the land that he freely admits to loving. Typically, Brown has a policy proposal ready for the U.S. presidential candidates, one he ran past McCain during the Senator's recent visit to London. "I was trying to sell him on the idea that America's gift to the world should be to offer every child the chance of education," says Brown, adding that there are 72 million primary school-age children in the world not enrolled for class. "That would do more for people's perception of America than almost anything else."

It's a very Brown notion -- sincere, well-meaning, international. It won't lead the evening news, which is his problem. But perhaps it should, which is ours.

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris and Lin Yang/Beijing