Brown in Washington

Gordon Brown just completed an official visit to the US, which unfortunately for him coincided with a much more reported visit of the Pope Benedict XVI ! Nevertheless, it was an interesting visit and commentators were eager to see whether the PM would continue to distance himself (relatively of course) from the Bush administration, as had seemed to be the case in his first visit as PM last summer. In the end, Brown returned to a very traditional British attitude, lavishing praise on President Bush (though he is a widely discredited and lameduck president by now) and hailing the 'special relationship' between the UK and the US - Bush was too happy to return the compliment. How can this (semi) turnaround be explained ? One reason is probably the situation in Iraq, which is so bad that the British government has had to postpone plans to withdraw troops from Basra and makes Anglo-American cooperation more necessary than ever in the eyes of both administrations. Another, more political reason could be that Brown, having witnessed the rapprochement between Sarkozy and Bush, does not want to be left behind and is trying to keep the UK's priviledged access to Washington.
Brown also met the three contenders for the next presidential election, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and John McCain, which was interpreted in the British media as another illustration of the vitality of the special relationship.
Yesterday, Brown delivered a major foreign policy speech in the JFK Library, which was not very notable except for its emphasis on interdependence and praise of globalisation, in a country - the US - where free trade is increasingly unpopular. He called for a reform of the multilateral institutions, UN, IMF, World Bank, to make them more representative and more efficient to tackle new challenges (failed states, climate change, the fight against terrorism). See the whole speech here. If this was, as some have said, his response to Blair's Chicago 1999 speech on liberal interventionism, emphasizing consensus instead, I doubt whether it will be as famous as his predecessor's.