UNCERTAIN BEACON

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AS THE LEADERS OF BOSNIA, CROATIA and Serbia crept toward a peace agreement last week at the U.S.-led talks in Dayton, Ohio, Bill Clinton must have sensed the possibility of a big score. Finally he would have an answer to those who have accused him of fecklessness on foreign policy. No longer could anyone call him "the Governor of the United States," uninterested in and incapable of fulfilling his duties as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. After all, the Europeans had spent several years trying to solve the Bosnia problem, and they had botched it. Now, after a few months of energetic military and diplomatic leadership on the part of the U.S., peace, or some version of it, was finally at hand. "If you look at the results, from Bosnia to Haiti," Clinton said recently, "from the Middle East to Northern Ireland, it proves once again that American leadership is indispensable and that without it our values, our interests and peace itself would be at risk." A Bosnia settlement would prove that Clinton can lead the world as well as he can lead Arkansas and would reaffirm America's global pre-eminence.

There is only one problem: the American people could hardly care less. More than that--they are actively hostile to the notion of American leadership if it requires risking American lives. In the case of Bosnia, that is exactly what American leadership has led to. Clinton has said he will send 20,000 troops to enforce a peace agreement, and Americans are deeply concerned about this prospect. They are not convinced that their sons and daughters should die for the sake of Sarajevo. Last Friday, in an extraordinary move, the House of Representatives voted to block Clinton from spending any money on the deployment of troops in Bosnia until both houses of Congress specifically authorize it. For peace to take hold in Bosnia, though, an American-led NATO force is probably essential. The coincidence last week of progress in the peace talks and Congress's reluctance to enforce a peace pointed up a grave dilemma: America must lead, but its people may not let it.

The U.S. has always tended to turn in on itself--Washington famously maintained in his farewell address that "it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world." Jefferson, too, warned against "entangling alliances." Even as its power has grown, America's expansiveness toward other countries has waxed and waned, as have the world's expectations of America. But conditions are such that it is again necessary to ask what U.S. relations with other nations ought to be and what they can be. The President is only intermittently engaged in foreign affairs. Congress is increasingly isolationist and at the same time assertive. The public is bored by international issues. Yet at the same time, America is poised to send troops to help a distant people. Beyond that, U.S. involvement abroad grows inexorably as its foreign trade booms and free-market democracy becomes the world's dominant ideology. More crucially, the world still looks to its only superpower for leadership. As the Israeli statesman Abba Eban said recently, "Nothing can happen without the Americans. Everything can happen with them."