The United States and the world have both changed a good deal since the days when President Richard Nixon could reflect: 'All you need is a competent cabinet to run the country at home. You need a president for foreign policy.' Even by the end of Nixon's own presidency, the international oil exporters had dashed the illusion that the US economy could go on growing unchecked forever. Twenty years on, the collapse of the Soviet Union changed the other half of the old equation, too, as has been brought forcefully home in the last week with the American attacks on Iraq and the diplomatic fall-out.
The world is a much more complicated place without the strategic certainties of the Cold War. The old and neat bi or tri-polar terms in which the North Atlantic teams up with East Asia against the Soviet bloc have vanished. Washington must pick and choose, forming international coalitions or acting unilaterally, influenced by everything from national interests to the amount of television coverage which world trouble-spots receive or genuine humanitarian concerns. At any one time, a dozen equally intractable conflicts are likely to be there to be tackled or ignored, often made all the more complex by involving old ethnic sores and disputed historic boundaries among nations no longer held in check by their former Cold War sponsors.
Bill Clinton's 1992 slogan 'It's the economy, stupid', was intended mainly as a rebuke to George Bush for behaving as if Richard Nixon's observation still held true. But it left the world in no doubt that foreign policy was not going to be his main concern. In fact, Mr Clinton was forced to learn as he went along, balancing domestic and world factors as he did so.
Certainly, Mr Clinton benefits greatly at home from being decisive and tough against foreign dictators; beyond that, however, he has also shown that he understands that Saddam Hussein cannot be allowed to go unpunished for sending thousands of troops into the Kurdish city of Arbil to support a factional coup. The Iraqi President revels in testing the limits of international patience. Without the bloody nose he received last week, he would soon be thumbing his nose at the United Nations in an even more outrageous adventure.
But Mr Clinton has still left his own back uncovered. He may not fully appreciate the international reluctance to intervene in a country's internal affairs. From Somalia to Bosnia, the Clinton administration has come to see partisan intervention in civil wars as the norm. But the President might have noticed that the international alliance which supported Mr Bush in throwing Iraq out of Kuwait vanished when it came to hot pursuit of Baghdad's forces inside its own borders.
The Arab neighbours of Iraq are embarrassed and angry over last week's missile attacks. So are France, Russia and China - all of whom believe that the US overreached itself to little strategic purpose. Above all, the firing of missiles and the extension of the no-fly zone will not help the people of Iraq overthrow their dictator. The Kurds will go on fighting each other - and being played off against each other by Turkey, Iran and Iraq - instead of working together to carve out a permanent homeland of their own. And Mr Clinton, as if to prove the limit of his concern for the Kurds or the preservation of international frontiers, actually supports Turkey's bid to carve out a security zone in Northern Iraq.
