David Cameron, the leader of Britain's Conservative opposition, is highly likely to be Britain's next prime minister when the general election comes in 12 to 18 months time. He is in effect the prime minister-in-waiting. His views about the international scene are therefore very important not just to the British but to Europe and, arguably, the whole world.

Very recently he made a speech of great significance while visiting Pakistan. It indicated that the Conservatives are beginning to shape out a distinctive and up-to-date view on international affairs and British foreign policy.

Far from being marginal to British politics, his words contain the seeds of the truly "big idea" that is needed to indicate that a Conservative government has something entirely new and different to offer. What Cameron had to say about the dangers of trying to export "democracy" as a package, or of imagining it can be "dropped from 10,000 feet" on some erring populace, shows that it just does not buy the simplified notions peddled by the outgoing Bush administration, to which former Prime Minister Tony Blair was so partial — namely that "democracy" is somehow "the property of the West and a system to be imposed on other cultures."

Set this realistic rejection of American notions alongside the parallel Conservative aim of reforming the EU into a more flexible and less centralized bloc, with fewer pretensions to strut on the world stage, and we have the beginnings of a far more confident Britain, ready to play an effective part in the new global network, building on its traditional world skills, its links with Asia and its pole position in the Commonwealth.

The message that flows from Cameron's insights is that Britain must not be hobbled in its international connections and contributions either by Washington's two-dimensional visions nor by the limp attitudes of our European partners, as they struggle in vain to reach a common foreign policy.

The whole starting point in EU thinking is wrong. Pooling foreign policy interests within the EU, far from bringing strength through unity, guarantees weakness through division and committee compromise. The reforming provisions in the recent Lisbon Treaty (now becalmed by the Irish rejection), far from overcoming this weakness, would make it much more pronounced.

But the other equally important fallacy, embraced even by those who have accepted the above view on the EU's foreign policy role, is that Britain must therefore cozy up even closer to America; otherwise we will be "isolated."

The significance of Cameron's comments is that the falsity of this argument,too, is recognized. In a network world, a nation like Britain, with its history and experience, and its connections, can be most effective if it works at a certain distance from both these blocks. "Solid but not slavish" is the neat and correct summary by William Hague, likely to be Cameron's future foreign minister, of how British-U.S. relations should be.

This clearing of the air about where Britain should stand now opens the way for a vigorous and creative development of British links and interests with the new players on the world stage — many of whom happen anyway to be Britain's old friends who in recent years have been looking on with some dismay while British policy has neglected them in favor of the European Union.

Top of the list come the rising nations to whom power, both economic and political, is fast shifting away from the old Atlantic axis. This is a trend about which one hears little from either U.S. presidential candidate. Both still speak as though America automatically possesses international leadership. What neither they nor large sections of the U.S. media have grasped, but what Cameron seems to perceive, is that while America is still a mighty economy its size no longer delivers influence. New power centers and alliances have grown.

The vast network of the modern Commonwealth provides Britain with a quick way into these new alliances and interests, notably through links with India, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Canada — to name but a few of the new global players. But the list of "new friends" on which the British should be working much harder is not limited to Commonwealth members, close though they can be thanks to common language and common values and, well, sheer informal friendship.

Waiting for the British to craft much warmer and stronger links are, for example, the Japanese, who long for a restoration of the old early 20th-century intimacy, the Middle East Gulf states, which always admired the British and wonder where they have gone, and even some of the newer EU members, which look uneasily at Brussels and remember Britain's old loyalty to Europe's smaller and more easterly states.

As for the other new giants like Russia, China and Brazil (the latter fast becoming, like Canada, a leading energy power), this is the time for Britain to establish its own distinctive relationships with these countries, well away from American or EU preconceptions and postures.

So, in sum, the new British leadership lying just ahead will be guided by a bold and profound critique of American misunderstandings of the new world, and an equally bold critique of the wrong direction in which too many are still trying to take the EU.

That, in turn, will open the way for a truly constructive British interdependence with the global network, while remaining in its role as good club members of a reformed Europe, keeping a sound but carefully calibrated friendship with America and sustaining its pivotal membership of the Commonwealth, which is emerging as the perfect model for 21st-century global relationships. Cameron's remarks open the gateway toward this uplifting prospect. It is only a start, but it is a very welcome one.

David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member of the House of Lords ([email protected] www.lordhowell.com).