Rice arrives in the UK

Friday, 4 February 2005 12:00 AM

New US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has arrived in the UK.

She will meet Tony Blair for breakfast before going into discussions with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Later, she will travel to Germany for a meeting with chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Ms Rice is expected to visit seven other European countries before moving to the Middle East, where she meets with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

She will then deliver a keynote speech on US-EU relations in Paris before returning to Washington.

Key topics for her eight-day tour are likely to be Iran, the Middle-East peace process, Zimbabwe and Syria.

She will underscore the message in her President's State of the Union address that George Bush intends to spread freedom and democracy across the globe during his second term of office.

Although she has pledged to forge multilateral diplomatic initiatives with the European "big three" - Britain, France and Germany - on ending Iran's nuclear weapons programme, she may come up against disagreement over her choice of rhetoric.

"Partners are not always going to agree," she said.

"What is important is that we have an atmosphere in which we can express our concerns and do that with partners willing to take each others' concerns into consideration as they make policy decisions."

Europe is determined to find a diplomatic solution to Iran's seeming-pursuit of nuclear technology and most leaders have ruled out any military action. For the US, force still remains a possibility.

Disagreements are also likely on Europe's support for the lifting of the Chinese arms embargo and European demands that the US acts on climate change and reduces its emissions.

Her visit comes ahead of March's London conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Mr Bush's visit to Europe and Britain later this month.

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