Why Europe can expect to be ticked off by Bill

THIRTY-TWO Januaries ago, on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave his famous inaugural address. Every detail of the scene has been etched by the chroniclers of Camelot: the eight inches of snow, the top hats worn by everyone except the bareheaded President, the aged poet, Robert Frost, reading his dedication of 'a Golden Age of poetry and power'.

Phrases from the speech, have entered the language: 'ask not what your country can do for you'; 'the torch has passed to a new generation'; 'pay any price, bear any burden' to assure the survival of liberty.

Brave words, and they were to lead straight into the quagmire of Vietnam. But there was not a single word about the problems of the United States. When Governor Clinton gives his inaugural address, a fortnight from now, it will be a surprise if he says more than a few sentences about the problems of anywhere else.

It is true that the United States is the last superpower, and that Bill Clinton, like George Bush before him, will face sudden crises in places like Kuwait or Somalia. International problems will be clamouring for his attention the moment he gets back from the inaugural ceremonies and walks into the Oval Office. But where Kennedy in 1961 was concerned about the threat of Communism from Berlin to Laos, Clinton in 1993 has to worry primarily about the federal debt and its deficit, about the cost of health care and the spread of crime.

America's domestic difficulties will be in the forefront of the new President's mind as he sits down to prepare his speech. For just as John Kennedy campaigned by warning Americans against the danger of Communist expansion, including what turned out to be a largely imaginary 'missile gap' between the US and the Soviet Union, so Clinton concentrated his attention in the campaign overwhelmingly on domestic problems and on the economy.

That choice of priorities, in turn, reflected the overwhelming concern of the American people about a cluster of interconnected economic and social problems: slow productivity growth, lack of competitiveness, the stubborn budget deficit, the cost of health insurance and the homeless sleeping in city streets. It is possible that the consensus of 1992 will turn out to have been too gloomy. As Japan and Europe stumble, there are already signs that the American economy is getting into its stride again. Still, it is hard to deny that George Bush lost the presidency because he neglected domestic affairs, and that Bill Clinton won because he read that mood right.

Clinton is now closeted with his advisers, and the puffs of smoke that drift up from their councils suggest that he will tackle the country's economic problems at home with some determination. But what will his policy be towards Europe and towards Britain?

He is the first US President since Kennedy to have been educated partly in Britain and, like Kennedy in 1939-40, took advantage of his time at Oxford in 1968-9 to explore Europe a little. Certainly he enjoyed his time in England, and is even a mild, amused Anglophile. Even so, the probability and the danger is that, both in Britain and in Europe, the new administration's interest and sympathy in our affairs will be greatly exaggerated.

In my experience, people in Britain think Americans are much more interested in us than in fact they are. Indeed, it is a national instinct, when trouble looms, to look to the United States for help. In 1917, in 1941-5, and again since 1947, the United States actually did come to our help, generously and decisively. As a result, if a British institution needs to raise funds, it often looks to America for help before it has tried nearer home. If the roof blows off a church in Kent, the reflex is to find an American Maecenas to pay to put it back, rather than start a whip-round among the parishioners. British companies find it easier to look to the US market for expansion; and even individuals, frustrated at home, saw a job in the United States as the answer until very recently.

The fact is, however, that Britain stands much smaller in American eyes than we think. The United States helped Britain and Europe against first Germany, then the Soviet Union, for its own reasons. Moreover, suspicion of Britain and Europe has always been widespread in the United States, though it coexists with sympathy and good feelings. To the great majority of Americans, after all, Europe is the continent from which their ancestors were absolutely right to emigrate; and Britain is a faraway country of which they know less than we realise.

This perfectly understandable indifference and suspicion is compounded by the particular time and circumstances in which the Clinton administration comes to office. There is the urgent need to attend to the economy. There is the abundant electoral evidence that the voters want domestic issues to be given priority. There is also a wave of disdain for the way 'the Europeans' have been behaving.

For a long time now, a strong current of opinion in the United States, flowing among liberals as well as conservatives, has been that a newly-prosperous Europe was not paying its dues in opposing Communism. Never mind that the Europeans may have been correct in judging that US policy rated the Soviet threat too highly.

In the autumn of 1989, Communism collapsed faster than anyone would have forecast. Then came the Gulf war. Some European countries were more reliable than others, as far as the Americans were concerned. Still, there was a brief moment when it seemed that a new world order of the kind President Bush proclaimed was possible. Those hopes, in Washington eyes, have been dashed. German reunification looks a mess. The European economies are no longer to be envied. 1993 was to have seen the crowning of the American dream of European union. Instead, the European nations are as disunited as ever. The tensions over immigration are reported as a wave of anti-Semitism and xenophobia spreading across Europe, almost as if the 1930s had come again.

But the crowning disgrace, in American eyes, is the abject failure of Europeans to respond in a united and purposeful way to the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, which does not look as far away to Americans as it seems to look in London or Bonn, or to the approaching crisis in the Soviet Union.

In a word, Americans are in an idealistic mood again, and they are shocked by the apparent lack of idealism in Europe. The attitude of the Clinton administration towards Europe, therefore, will be friendly, but wary, assertive of American interests, and censorious to the brink of self-righteousness.

As for the British, they are, to the Americans, just Europeans who happen to speak the same language. The relationship will, as always, be asymmetrical: they are simply so much more important to us than we are to them. The best we can hope for is that something of the new optimism Bill Clinton is bringing to Washington may rub off on us.