In Brown's signature speech, a JFK touch

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts welcomed Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain yesterday at the John F. Kennedy Library. (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)

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

It was there that Blair explained his vision of robust interventionism, the idea that the world's richest, most powerful democracies would go in 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. Four years later, it became the rationale for entering the war that became his domestic Waterloo: Iraq.

Yesterday, 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 than Blair. He and his wife vacation regularly on Cape Cod. As chancellor of the Exchequer, Brown tried 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 United Kingdom 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. He implored the richest nations to shake up the world order by abandoning the Cold War mindset: by expanding the five-member Security Council of the United Nations to include emerging powerhouses; to make the World Bank a green institution that 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.

Brown never mentioned the man he replaced in June. In fact, while he came to bury part of the Blair doctrine, he tried to resuscitate another part articulated in Chicago in 1999. He reiterated 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 trans-Atlantic 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 President Bush.

But Brown is no Blair. One of his first acts as prime minister was to reduce British troop levels in Iraq. He has called for a more collaborative approach between the United States 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 preemptive war. 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 at Harvard University in 1947 , 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 facilitate radicalism and terrorism, where there are no frontiers, the idea that any country can survive and prosper on its own is gone, he said.

Brown insisted, like his predecessor, that "American leadership is and will be indispensable."

The audience, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Governor Deval Patrick, gave Brown a long standing ovation.

But whether Brown's vision prevails may depend on who gets the vote in November and whether Americans are willing to elect a leader that one of their closest allies says is incumbent of them.

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