FOR AN AMERICAN ambassador facing an international crisis, the political swamp of Washington can suddenly appear as foreign as his host nation's capital. If events go badly wrong, he can find himself shut out from his masters' key policy decisions, but scapegoated by hungry cliques of foreign-affairs analysts, insiders and administrators. Even in less volatile times there is the threat of the sneer that he represented his hosts' interests in Washington rather than America's abroad.
Recent history has thrown up some stark images. As North Vietnamese troops closed on Saigon in 1975, there was the controversial Ambassador Graham Martin, addled by pneumonia and a chronic lack of sleep, clinging to the belief that his ally's southern flanks could be defended. Martin refused to order the evacuation, raging obscenely against his internal critics at 'Foggy Bottom' - State Department headquarters. He was finally overruled from Washington and eventually put into a helicopter from the embassy roof just hours before the final fall.
More recently came the image of Ambassador James Sasser staring from a shattered window of the US Embassy in Beijing in March 1999. The US-led Nato bombing of China's Embassy in Belgrade sparked violent anti-American protests across the mainland, just as Mr Sasser's term was ending.
Beijing put relations on ice, bringing then-president Bill Clinton's engagement policies under more fire within the Republican Party's right wing and making Mr Sasser a target yet again. Now it is Mr Sasser's replacement, Admiral Joseph Prueher, who is in the hot seat.
The lean, fit frame of Admiral Prueher has been a familiar sight on television screens over the past 11 days as he has scuttled up the steps of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing for more negotiations over the Hainan Island spy-plane impasse. The talks, over the 24 American aircrew and the EP-3E spy plane stranded on the mainland following its collision with a Chinese jet fighter, may not have reached Belgrade - much less Saigon - proportions, but with each passing day, Sino-US relations were put in greater danger, analysts and US officials warned.
Admiral Prueher, whose position as ambassador was confirmed in November 1999, was the first to deliver some of the Bush administration's toughest statements when he described the detention of the crew as being 'inexplicable and unacceptable and of grave concern'. He was also one of the first to express careful remorse when he stated: 'It appears also that the Chinese have lost an aircraft and we are sorry that has occurred.'