British Pm to Meet With Presidential Candidates During Us Visit

Gordon Brown will next week hold meetings in Washington with each of the three presidential candidates in an attempt to establish a rapport with the man or woman who will become the next leader of the US.

Although Brown is to visit President George Bush twice at the White House on Thursday, the main focus of his time in the capital is separate meetings planned for the same day with all three presidential candidates, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.

All three have agreed to the meetings, to be held either at the British embassy or the residence of the ambassador, Sir Nigel Sheinwald. In an attempt to avoid accusations of British bias in favor of one candidate, each has been allocated a strict 45 minutes.

Tony Blair's close relationship to Bush was a big contributory factor in his loss of public support after the 2003 Iraq invasion. But Brown, as have all his predecessors since the second world war, needs at least a good working relationship with the Oval Office incumbent.

One of the biggest worries in Downing Street about the next president is trade. There is alarm at Number Ten, which passionately favors free trade, over the increasingly protectionist rhetoric from Clinton and Obama in their attempts to win over working-class voters who blame job losses on free trade agreements.

There will also be discussions about Iraq, where the British contingent is now down to 4,000, mainly holed up in Basra international airport.

Both Clinton and Obama have said they will begin withdrawal of America's 160,00 combat troops within months of taking office, and Obama has said all US combat troops would be out of the country by December 2009.

But McCain has pledged to keep US troops in the country until stability is secure, even if, as he has said, it takes 100 years.

Other issues on the agenda include Afghanistan and Iran, as well as poverty reduction and climate change. All three candidates, in contrast with Bush, favour action to tackle climate change.

Brown, who is instinctively close to the Democrats and knows many senior members of the party from frequent visits across the Atlantic as a young opposition MP, has a good relationship with both Bill and Hillary Clinton. He also met McCain in Downing Street last month, which both men said afterwards had gone well.

But he has not yet met Obama, who is the favorite to take the Democratic nomination and face McCain in the November general election.

Brown is to begin the trip in New York on Wednesday with a visit to the United Nations to see the secretary-general, Ban Ki Moon, and the South African leader, Thabo Mbeki, who is making a speech at the security council.

He will meet the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and then head to Wall Street for talks with financiers on the economic crisis.

He will see Bush early on Thursday at the White House, followed by a joint press conference, and dinner in the evening.

Top of the agenda at the White House is joint co-operation on action to tackle impending recession but the White House said that Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, poverty reduction and climate change are also listed.

Brown heads to Boston on Friday to deliver at the John Kennedy Memorial Library one of the biggest foreign policy speeches he had made since becoming premier.

Brown is to call for the restructuring of the world major institutions, including the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union, to reflect the challenges of the 21st century.

A trip to Harvard, where Blair is to begin teaching religion and politics in the autumn, has also been tentatively penciled in.

Foreign policy specialists in Washington who have served in Democratic and Republican administrations know Blair well, as does the American public, but are still trying to get to grips with Brown.

One of the biggest debates taking place among the foreign policy community in DC is over how the US can restore good relations with Europe after Bush and they are puzzled that Britain is never mentioned as a potential bridge-builder, as it would have been in the past.

Flynt Leverett, a former national security council official and now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a liberal think-tank, said: "I think it is clear that Brown does not have nearly the same profile in the US that Tony Blair developed ... It is striking that no-one is highlighting at this point a British role in helping restore relations with Europe post-Bush."

Leverett added: "Trade is a worry. The two Democratic candidates are competing with one another to be more protectionist than the other."

Tom Mann, a specialist in politics at the Brookings Institution, said: "Brown is well known among policy specialists and Democratic party strategists but not by the American public. He hasn't yet had an opportunity to gain the attention that Blair did, and that may be a good thing.

"Britain almost always matters to US presidents and will again in the new administration but nothing like the dependence Bush had on Blair for legitimizing his adventure in Iraq."