For signature speech, a touch of JFK

Nine years ago, Tony Blair gave his definitive foreign policy speech in Chicago.

It was in the Windy City that Blair explained his vision of robust interventionism, the idea that the world's richest, most powerful democracies would go in and kick some righteous butt when a corrupt or criminal regime abused its citizens. The Blair doctrine was meant to justify NATO's first attack of a sovereign nation, in this case, Serbia, which had been led down a lousy path by a two-bit gangster named Slobodan Milosevic. What Blair spelled out in Chicago became, four years later, the rationale for entering the quagmire that became his domestic Waterloo: Iraq.

Today, Blair's successor as prime minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, chose the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston as the place to give what his aides said was his signature foreign policy address.

The location made sense. Brown is, in some ways, a bigger Americaphile - is that a word? - than Blair, whose premiership ended precisely because he was more popular in the Beltway than Blackpool. Brown and his wife vacation regularly on Cape Cod. As chancellor of the exchequer, Brown launched an ambitious effort to make scientists at Cambridge and Oxford, Britain's most prestigious universities, act more like the academic-entrepreneurs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believing that his country's best minds needed to be more Americanesque in creating jobs, not just research. Now, as prime minister, he wants to create a British version of the GI Bill for UK veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And yesterday, as he gave a speech he hopes will define his premiership, Brown borrowed heavily from Kennedyesque rhetoric, imploring the richest nations to shake up the world order by abandoning the Cold War mindset: by expanding the 5-member Security Council of the United Nations to include emerging powerhouses; to make the World Bank a green bank which would finance the reduction of carbon emissions; to let the International Monetary Fund operate like an independent central bank that would prevent international financial crises like the mortgage meltdown rather than just react to them.

Brown never mentioned the man he replaced last June. In fact, while he came to bury part of the Blair doctrine, he tried to resuscitate another part articulated in Chicago in 1999, by reiterating Blair's call to reform international institutions, saying they reflected post-World War II sensibilities that are increasingly obsolete in an era of globalization.

Like his predecessor, Brown sees himself as something of a transAtlantic bridge, a facilitator between the United States and not just Europe, as Blair viewed himself. Brown might help connect America to the rest of the world, which is if anything more distant to many Americans as the country turned inward during eight years under a president whose previous idea of foreign travel was to leave Texas for Oklahoma.

But Brown is no Blair. One of his first acts as prime minister was to reduce British troop levels in Iraq.

If Blair was derided by his enemies as Bush's poodle, Brown wants a more collaborative approach, especially between the US and Europe.

Brown quoted not Bush, not Blair, but Jack Kennedy, saying he wanted to renew JFK's declaration of interdependence in 1962.

"Acting upon our interdependence does not mean a new version of the old balance of power arrangements based on opposing powers bargaining for their own narrow advantage," Brown said. "Nor does it mean abandoning national interests. Instead, the very fact of interdependence requires nations to work out new ways of working founded on the recognition that they can best pursue their national interests by invoking broader global alliances - and that these global alliances must be grounded in shared global goals and globally agreed rules and institutions."

To Brown, climate change is as much, if not more, of a threat as Al Qaeda, because the former has the potential to wreak far more suffering and create a real sense of inequity, which feeds support for terrorism. He said the developed world has a key interest in stability in poorer parts.

"Once we feared rival nations becoming too strong," he said. "Now the worst threats come from states that are too weak. And we know that the richest citizen in the richest country can be directly affected by what happens to the poorest citizen in the poorest country."

Brown went out of his way to praise President Bush for "leading the world in our determination to root out terrorism and our common commitment that there be no safe haven for terrorists."

But it was hard to read Brown's speech as anything but a repudiation of the Bush doctrine - and, by extension, the Blair doctrine - of pre-emptive war, which has given us the disaster that is Iraq. The threat of military force, while obviously part of the equation, cannot on its own win hearts and minds. Brown quoted the speech that George Marshall gave in Boston 60 years ago, that our enemy never will be just one country, but instead is "hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos." He also reminded his mostly American audience that the Marshall Plan was visionary and that transferring 1 percent of America's national income for each of four years to the devastated countries of Europe was, as another British prime minister might have put it, America's finest hour.

In a world that has never known such affluence, Brown noted, some 2.5 billion people subsist on less than $2 a day; 77 million children are not in school; 10 million people die every year of preventable disease.

"Ours is already a world where no 'us' - however rich or influential - can pull up the drawbridge in an attempt to gain protection from a 'them,'" he said.

In a globalized economy, in a world where rogue individuals can do as much harm as rogue states once did, where the Internet can be used to faciliate radicalism and terrorism, where there are no frontiers, the idea that any country can survive and propser on its own is gone.

"Unilateralism is over," Brown said.

As leader of a nation that has faced repeated attempts at mass murder by Islamic extremists, Brown said the threat to modern democracies can come from within just as often as from without.

"The reality is that we are all affected now by what happens in Asia or Latin America or Africa. And if we do not work across countries and continents to create a globalization that is inclusive for all, then not only will the poorest of the world who lose out react to being excluded, but people in our own countries will feel, as many do today, victims not beneficiaries of the process of change, losers and not winners, and protectionist sentiment will gain ground."

Brown acknowledged that what he was proposing was "perhaps more ambitious than even the Bretton Woods conference of 1944," when the western powers drew up a postwar plan. And he insisted, like his predecessor, that "American leadership is and will be indispensable," which explains why, besides seeing Bush in Washington the other day, Brown met with each of the three presidential candidates.

Brown drew on a personal experience to explain why addressing poverty and social and economic inequity is just as, if not more, important as hunting fanatics in the mountains of Afghanistan, the seething metropolises of Pakistan and the bomb-scarred cities of Iraq.

He visited Abuja in Nigeria and noticed that next door to "a dilapidated school that we did not support enough was a madrassa where Al Qaeda-inspired extremists were enticing children into their school offering free, high standard schooling," he said. "So our offer of education for all is not just an education and economic policy for the developing world it is a defense and security policy for the developed world."

The audience, including Senator Ted Kennedy and Gov. Deval Patrick, lapped it up, giving Brown a long, lusty standing ovation.

But whether Brown's vision is any more than that depends on who gets elected in November. It has everything to do with who the incumbent becomes next January, and whether Americans are willing to take up the leadership that the leader of their closest allies says is incumbent of them.

Kevin Cullen, the Globe's former London bureau chief, is a Globe columnist.