PM seeks joint crisis front with Obama

By Adrian Croft

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown hopes to forge an alliance this week with U.S. President Barack Obama to combat the global financial crisis and reinforce what London calls its special relationship with Washington.

Brown will be the first European leader to meet Obama since he was inaugurated in January when they hold talks on Tuesday in Washington. He hopes cooperation over the economic crisis will mirror cooperation on security, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But political analysts say he should limit his expectations of the visit, which comes at a time of anxiety in Britain over the relationship with Washington.

They say Britain's ability to play a lead role is limited by the depth of its own economic crisis, and a much broader alliance is needed than one between two countries whose policies have been partly blamed for the crisis. Washington's attention is increasingly on Asia rather than Europe, they say.

Brown wants to build a consensus on action to counter the financial crisis before he hosts a summit of the Group of 20 industrialised and emerging nations in London on April 2.

"President Obama and I will discuss this week a global new deal, whose impact can stretch from the villages of Africa to reforming the financial institutions of London and New York," Brown wrote in the Sunday Times.

He favours coordinated measures to stabilise the world economy, reform regulation of the banking system and increase the International Monetary Fund's firepower to help countries hard hit by the crisis.

Reginald Dale, senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Obama would listen to Brown, a former finance minister who was among the first western heads of government to propose a sweeping state rescue programme to rescue crisis-hit banks and revive dwindling lending.