Brown has outsourced British foreign policy

Now we know. Until now, we Americans have been wondering whether we were witnessing from the new boy on the foreign policy stage a cock-up or a considered change in Britain’s policy towards the United States.

When Gordon Brown exclaimed that he would never have appointed the man who wears his hatred of the American president and the neoconservatives as ‘a badge of honour’ had he known how offensive Malloch Brown would be to George Bush and the Americans, there was an inclination to believe him, even though it taxed credulity to think the Prime Minister had been so badly briefed. When the Prime Minister ‘went out of his way to be unhelpful’, in the words of one participant at the Bush–Brown meeting in Camp David, there was some willingness to attribute Brown’s frosty behaviour to his need to placate the Labour Left by distancing himself from Tony Blair’s approach to the President, and to a natural Scottish reserve. And when Brown’s Secretary of State for International Development and close political ally, Douglas Alexander, chose to unburden himself of a speech that attacked America in not-very-oblique terms for everything from unilateralism to relying too heavily on ‘what they could destroy’, old Washington hands were willing to guess that the intended insult had escaped the review of a new Prime Minister, still organising his office.

But since then it has become clear that one of the important foundations of Gordon Brown’s foreign policy is to distance himself from America. Long after he could use as an excuse the disorder attendant upon his move from No. 11 to No. 10 Downing Street, his Development Secretary was again in the United States, again at work to embarrass the President. One day after Bush called for tougher sanctions on Burma, Alexander convened a meeting in Washington to call for ‘aid, trade and debt relief’ for that country.