AS President Bill Clinton departed from Minsk, the capital of Belarus, on Saturday, after a week of meeting the personalities and problems of Europe, he was probably hoping that he had laid firm foundations for one particular achievement: the abdication of the world's third-and eighth-largest nuclear powers.
Belarus, the republic which was worst affected by the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, had earlier agreed to forgo the intercontinental nuclear missiles left on its soil when the Soviet Union died. Mr Clinton had scheduled his Belarus stopover as a diplomatic thank-you for that decision, just in case the Ukraine proved recalcitrant over letting go of its far greater array of nuclear warheads. But the Ukraine signed on the dotted line last Friday in the Kremlin. So Mr Clinton hopes that his first European diplomatic foray has resulted in a major step towards nuclear non-proliferation.
Beyond that, the US President has executed a neat balancing act between the contrary perspectives of Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia. Mr Clinton tried to give fresh thrust to the lagging drive for economic reform in Russia. He also reached out to the Russian people in a more dynamic and direct way than any previous visiting American leader - or any past Russian leader for that matter.
But perhaps an equally significant development was that Mr Clinton did to Europe what he has already quietly done to Asia.
The emerging ''Clinton Doctrine'' took further shape, whereby the US expects Europeans - and Asians - to deal with some of their regions' vexed problems themselves, without depending on US involvement.
LATE last year, the Clinton administration let it be known that, provided the primacy of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum was not undermined, it does not have the same fixed objections that the Reagan and Bush administrations had to purely Asian groupings, such as the East Asian Economic Caucus (EAEC).