London and Washington at Loggerheads
How Gordon Brown has alienated Barack Obama.

By CON COUGHLIN

London

It says something about the parlous state of relations between Washington and London that a Democratic American president can use words like "lackluster," "depressing" and "dour" to describe a prime minister from the British Labour party.

According to "Renegade," a new biography of President Barack Obama by British journalist Richard Wolffe, these were the words the president used to describe his first impressions of Prime Minister Gordon Brown after they met in July last year. Now, following the scandal surrounding the Brown government's involvement in the decision to repatriate the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, one suspects another word is being used at the White House to sum up Mr. Obama's view of his British counterpart: duplicitous.

One might assume that a left-of-center politician like Mr. Obama would enjoy much common ground with Mr. Brown—especially as Mr. Brown went out of his way, after coming to power in the summer of 2007, to distance himself from President George W. Bush. But it was not to be.

Mr. Brown may have earned much praise on the international stage for the prominent role he played in leading the global bailout of the banking sector last fall, but U.S. officials have told me that many of Mr. Obama's aides were put off by Mr. Brown's hectoring tone.

Of more concern, though, has been Mr. Brown's apparent lack of commitment to prosecuting the war on terror—the defining issue in Anglo-American relations since 9/11.

Within weeks of becoming prime minister, Mr. Brown effectively ordered British troops based in Iraq to withdraw to their barracks in Basra. This meant hard-pressed American forces were obliged to take over operational duties in southern Iraq, a development that did not endear the British military to the Pentagon.

Mr. Brown has adopted a similarly lackluster approach to the military campaign in Afghanistan which, so far as the Obama administration is concerned, is now the main priority in the war on terror. After the embarrassment of Britain's low-key withdrawal from Iraq, British commanders were keen to supplement Britain's military deployment to southern Afghanistan with an extra brigade. Mr. Brown refused to authorize the increase on cost grounds. The result? The American military was once again required to make up for the shortfall.

Senior British military officers have complained privately to me that while Mr. Brown might be an able politician, he does not sufficiently understand the concept of leadership. By refusing to agree to a modest increase in British troop numbers, they say he has needlessly diminished Britain's standing in Washington, where its reliability as an ally is now increasingly called into question.

Indeed, Mr. Brown's conduct in the Megrahi scandal can be seen as yet another failure of leadership. At first, his default position was to say he had "no role" in the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber, such was his desperation to ensure he suffered no damage to his reputation. He failed to grasp that on an issue that was bound to have global repercussions, he should have made it his business to have a role, and that it was clearly in Britain's national interest for him to do so.

Both the reputation of Mr. Brown and the country he is supposed to govern has been severely damaged by this tawdry affair. This is something the prime minister will discover when he attends the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh later this month.

Until the Megrahi affair, Mr. Brown might have expected a warm reception for his contribution to resolving the global economic crisis. Instead, all he is likely to receive from the Obama administration is a cold shoulder.

Mr. Coughlin is the executive foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph in London and the author of "Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam" (Ecco, 2009).