Question: You are returning to work with the Democrats. Is it odd that the prime minister, who was so close to president Clinton, has aligned himself with a right-wing republican president?

James Rubin: I've become senior foreign policy advisor to General Wesley Clark's campaign.

It's certainly true that prime minister Blair has had a uniquely close relationship with both President Clinton and President Bush. I suspect that with President Bush his ties and his bonding discussions are not so much about politics and the ways and means of the centre-left becoming more successful and more about foreign affairs specifically.

Blair probably has a different kind of close relationship with Bush than he does with Clinton.

Question: Is there an ideological relationship?

James Rubin: Even when people disagree they can develop a certain level of trust between them and I think on foreign policy terms they've obviously had to make some very tough decisions together and appear quite close. But I think with Clinton I think it was probably broader and deeper than that.

Question: Is Blair playing a clever game where he carves a special relationship with whoever the US president happens to be on his watch?

James Rubin: I wouldn't call it a clever game; I would call it British foreign policy. It's not new for British foreign policy to develop a close relationship between the British prime minister and the American president. It's been going on for decades.

Question: Do the Democrats see Bush's close relationship with Blair in negative terms? Is it something that could assist the president at the ballot box?

James Rubin: There's not question that Tony Blair is an extraordinarily popular person in America. The American people developed a great fondness and respect for him in the days after September 11 for the way he communicated solidarity and committed troops and support.

To what extent this will play at the ballot box, I doubt it will be much, mostly for two reasons.

The American people look at the question of 'does President Bush develop successful, strong ties with allies around the world?' The answer is going to be "no" given the fact that United States has been so isolated on issue after issue after issue.

Yes, Tony Blair is with him on Iraq but he has disagreed with him on the environment, on the Guantanamo prisoners, on the international criminal court, on the Middle East peace process, on issue after issue.

But more importantly, the salient perception of the American people is that not only has President Bush not developed the kind of close ties with leaders across Europe and Asia that they would like to see, but secondly the American people discovered that despite his close ties with Blair our closest friend - the British nation - was not that welcoming to Bush's policies.

Question: How was President Bush's state visit portrayed in America? Did they see the demonstrations?

James Rubin: I suspect that for the first time the American people had tended to see Britain through the person of Tony Blair. When there were demonstrations against the war in Iraq there were demonstrations all over Europe and they probably blurred together.

But with the focus with this visit only on the UK, the TV screens in America included rather dramatic pictures of the extent to which even in Britain, the President and his policies were not well received.

Question: The Hutton inquiry could be very damaging. Could there be implications for the Bush administration?

James Rubin: Well, I think the real difficulty for the Bush administration on Iraq is not so much on who said what on weapons of mass destruction but rather the spectacular miscalculation on how to run Iraq after the fall of Saddam and the difficulties we've been having there in stabilising the situation and transferring power to the Iraqis. And the problem that we weren't perceived as the liberators the way the American people were told.

WMD was only one piece of a set of concerns that the American people might have about the war.

Here the WMD was much more central to Tony Blair's argument and the difficulties that might arise from this inquiry might play more significantly. On the other hand as the inquiry is about the handling of a particular weapons scientist more than an examination of the intelligence and how it was used, it really wouldn't play particularly, I would think, in America.

Question: If Tony Blair begins to look like "damaged goods" will the Bush team distance themselves from their "closest ally"?

James Rubin: No. First of all, I would be surprised if the result of the Hutton inquiry makes people outside Britain regard him in a different way. For example, I would doubt it would have much impact at all on the American people's friendship and respect for him.

Question: Jack Straw has been trying to negotiate with Iran - part of the "Axis of Evil" - over its nuclear weapons. How long has he got to produce results before Bush steps in?

James Rubin: I really don't know what the intentions of the administration are with effect to Iran. My personal opinion is that on the face of it, the work of the British, German and the French acting together did achieve some results that the world and America should want - the commitment by Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and a commitment to allow any time, anywhere inspections.

If those commitments are fulfilled in fact not just in word I think they will be a step in the right direction to deal with a real challenge. If you look at Iran and compare it to Iraq, the case with Iraq was that you had a state sponsor of terror that was developing nuclear weapons. Neither of which turned out to be true but in the case of Iran that really is true.

You have the biggest state sponsor of terrorism internationally and a nuclear weapons programme that's much, much further along than Iraq's ever was. That combination that was talked about so much in the run-up to the Iraq war really exists in Iran in a way that never did in Iraq.

Question: On issues such as trade and Kyoto are we seeing a retreat to fortress America?

James Rubin: You know, it is a remarkable thing to have an administration that spouted the words of open and free trade but at the earliest convenience for political reasons on the farm bill and on the steel tariffs began to pursue policies that would be hard to describe as anything but protectionist.

On the other hand the administration appears to have bowed to the will of the World Trade Organisation and the Europeans on the steel tariffs. In the long run I think the American direction will continue to be for open and free trade.

But let's face it when it comes to trade, nobody's hands are clean. The European's hands are not clean on agricultural subsidies and other support systems for their industries. And neither are the Americans.

What we want to do is to get everybody to begin to move in the right direction and realise that a rising tide of trade raises the core votes.

Question: Is the EU perceived as a threat to the US given its market is the size of Japan and America combined?

James Rubin: Well, there's certainly people who look though the prism of a zero sum game and with the other games we lose. The economists who understand this issue know it's a mistake. The principles of open trade provide advantages to both sides.

But I would admit that unlike foreign policy, where the European's don't have a policy, on trade issues they tend to have a more united stance. That does tend to lend itself to a more competitive situation than in foreign and national security.

Question: Can Britain really be the bridge between the two - doesn't it eventually have to decide where it's true loyalty's lie?

James Rubin: I do think there have been times when Tony Blair has genuinely served as that bridge. Certainly in the early days after September 11. European ministers were rushing to have dinner with him because he was going to see Bush. Certainly in the run up to the war in Iraq when it seemed that the Bush administration wanted to pursue a diplomatic path to gathering world support.

But as it turned out the administration didn't assign a high value to getting international support and wasn't prepared to make the rather modest adjustments they could or should have been made to achieve international support. Thus Blair's role as a bridge between the two became irrelevant.

On the other hand there is something to the idea that Britain is America's first stop as it seeks support in Europe. And European's recognise that to get a flavour of what's going on in America, it often helps to talk to the British foreign ministry or the prime minister himself.

Question: Do the Democrats now have someone to rally round in General Wesley Clark? From this side of the Atlantic he's the only one topping the bill.

James Rubin: Let me be frank. He is not a professional politician. He started in this game very late. Although it might not seem late to people in Europe, to start a presidential campaign just a year before an election is unheard of. When you've never been a politician you don't have a support system and a track record to bring to the voters.

So it's a tough challenge for him but I believe in the end the debate in next fall between the republicans and the democrats is going to be a debate marked by very vigorous attempts by republicans to paint democrats as weak on national security. The national security component will be bigger than ever before in modern times in the campaign.

General Clark, who has obtained the support of the Democrat Party, would be in my judgement the most successful in standing up to those attacks on the Democratic Party and the unjustified attacks on its patriotism or strength and it's approach to foreign affairs.

He wouldn't only be able to withstand the attacks but win the argument that the democratic approach to these problems has a greater chance of providing security to the United States.

Question: No president would get Kyoto legislation through Congress. Some people believe that a change to a democrat president would mean a change in tone but not in substance on issues outside the US. Is that fair?

James Rubin: I would make several points on that. Certainly the other issues in the cluster of international treaties that matter to Europeans, like the Comprehensive Test Ban and the International Court and the Biological Weapons Convention and those issues, I think you would see a different approach.

The most concrete example is that you wouldn't see an American president punishing Eastern European allies for refusing to provide immunity to the courts provisions, the way the Bush administration has been doing.

On the environment, look, there is a large majority in Congress and in the American people that will want to be sure that any commitment we make to reduce emissions are part of commitments that are made not just by the Western powers but also China and India where we face the greatest possible emissions in the future.

The difference would be that environmental problems would not be an afterthought but would be an early through. Whether it was precisely the Kyoto protocol or not, the indication that the Russians are going to refuse to ratify show the difficulty of that particular instrument.

I think that Kyoto will be taken seriously and there will be a recognition that the science is real and should not be challenged. The fact of the matter is that in America the treaty mechanism is a difficult mechanism because of the power of the senate.

Even though a democratic president would believe more strongly in the need for multi-national action, it doesn't have to be by treaty. It could be by policy or best practice or other agreements that don't necessarily reach the threshold of a treaty.

Question: The will of the president is still the key factor? James Rubin: Yes.

Question: Given there's a presidential election next year, at what point will the focus of US politicians shift away from issues like Iraq?

James Rubin: It's very hard to know precisely what the intentions of the Bush administration are. Whether they're rushing to hand off to the Iraqis for some political reason or whether they realise their initial approach was faulty.

I think it's safe to say come next summer the attention of the president and the Democratic party will be pretty exclusively focused on the election campaign and the vote in November.

On the other hand on major issues of war and peace and national security the rest of the president's team will be busy working and tending to stay away from the political season.