Gordon Brown bears no physical resemblance to the lanky Jimmy Stewart who starred in the 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But when he makes his first trip to the United States as prime minister this week, Mr. Brown's hosts are not likely to find his version of naiveté any more endearing than the Washington establishment found Mr. Smith's.

Smith thought congressmen viewed their jobs as doing what was right for the country; he was quickly disabused of that idea. Brown thinks the Bush administration is unaffected when he caters to fellow Labourites by putting some "clear blue water" between himself and the president.

Diplomatic courtesy will prevent the Bush administration from disabusing the prime minister of that idea when he comes to Washington later this week. So he will wing home convinced that he has persuaded the president that the appointment of Mark Malloch Brown as Britain's representative to the U.N., Africa, and Asia and the recent unfriendly emissions from his cabinet colleagues are not intended to consign the special relationship to the dustbin of history. Malloch Brown will be a particular hurdle, though, since the White House is said to be still fuming over his participation in the campaign to prevent Senate confirmation of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

The prime minister hopes to maintain this balancing act for the remaining 17 months of Bush's term--telling the Americans that he is true blue, while at the same time persuading the Brits that he has shaken loose from the old Bush-Blair relationship. By then he deems it likely that he will be interacting with a Democratic president, one less likely to have a foreign policy as aggressive in fighting terror as the neoconservative incumbent.

Not that Gordon Brown is soft on terrorism. After all, no sooner had he moved into No. 10 Downing Street than terrorists attempted to slaughter thousands in central London and at the Glasgow airport. Rather, it is that he firmly believes that the way to fight terrorism is to stimulate economic development in places such as Hamas-controlled Gaza, and in pursuit of that objective has sent his top colleague, Harvard-educated Ed Balls, on several trips to the Middle East in recent years. Show Gordon Brown a terrorist, and he will show you an unemployed young man yearning for a decent job.

Here is the state of play on the eve of the prime minister's visit. Brown's international development secretary, Douglas Alexander, the prime minister's closest associate with the exception of Balls, travels to America to tell the Council on Foreign Relations that Britain plans to "form new alliances," and that its foreign policy will emphasize multilateralism and "soft power," both of which America is supposed to oppose. The press was briefed by Alexander's staff in advance of the speech to make certain that reporters would notice how the language was chosen to distinguish Britain's approach to foreign affairs from America's. Alexander also warns that Britain will no longer measure nations' might by "what they could destroy," which will come as a surprise to those who remember that it was the destructive power of the American military that helped prevent Alexander from growing up a German-speaker.

The press in both countries, taking its cue from the briefings, interprets this as telling America that henceforth it is, at best, one among equals, and then only if it mends its ways. Brown, advised by friends that the press reports are doing him considerable damage in Washington, announces publicly that the Times, the Guardian, the Sun, and the Telegraph, among others, are misrepresenting Alexander's speech, and privately assures his friends that all of the political analysts have it wrong. As for Malloch Brown, the prime minister professes to have been unaware of the administration's very negative reaction to the former U.N. bureaucrat's anti-American rants back when he was defending Kofi Annan's corrupt administration of the Iraq Oil-for-Food program. But he says he needs Malloch Brown because of his African expertise, and passes the word that his namesake is to be confined to African matters: If he strays into other areas, he is gone.