Next week's visit to the North by Bill Clinton should be the fourth by a serving American president, not the third. Capitalising on Ulster's key role in maintaining the Atlantic defences, Lord Brookeborough lobbied unsuccessfully for Northern Ireland to be included in President Eisenhower's UK tour.
Despite the unease that President Clinton's imagined policy agenda and private conduct generates among sections of the grassroots, David Trimble, the Unionist leader, has engaged positively with the current White House administration. As his reward, he would point to President Clinton's assurance on the eve of the Good Friday agreement that the issue of paramilitary disarmament would not be buried. His recent letter to the President underlined the significance of the opportunity which the visit presents for a resolution of the arms issue. He emphasised the debt republicans owe the outgoing administration for granting the Adams visa and allowing Sinn Fein to fundraise in the US.
White House sources have tried to dampen expectations, however. From talking about the President being in "politically active" mode last week, they are now briefing that we should not expect miracles.
The IRA statement of Tuesday night, closely following as it did the contours of Gerry Adams's address to IRA volunteers in south Armagh at the weekend, gave neither the President, nor unionists, many grounds for hope. While reiterating the republican movement's commitment to the resolution of the issue of arms, it has made even the initiation of a process to put arms beyond use highly conditional.
British officials will express only exasperation at the reiteration of demands on demilitarisation and policing - as if the Patten reforms have not already jeopardised Trimble's position. Peter Mandelson has expressed his frustration that nationalists and republicans seem to be in thrall to Prof Clifford Shearing's analysis that the Patten Report has been "eviscerated". Somebody must rue appointing him to the Patten Commission. Was London aware that in his book Policing For a New South Africa Shearing appeared to endorse the township practice of whipping offenders as having "the particular benefits of immediacy, of calculated, measured punishment"?
But if the prospects of the IRA shifting on arms in the next week seem quite bleak, republican leaders would do well to ponder the international scene post-Clinton. Neither Al Gore nor George Bush will want to identify as closely with the Northern Ireland issue which is, in truth, a stubborn but small-scale conflict with almost no wider strategic implications for US foreign policy.
Amid all the talk of detached, dimpled and pregnant chads, the balance of advantage remains with George Bush. The Texas Governor has famously only been outside the United States on a handful of occasions in his entire life. His weak grasp of foreign policy will cause him to rely on his advisers and the National Security Council establishment, all of whom are firmly Atlanticist. We can expect every effort to be made to rebuild the so-called special relationship between the US and the UK. While Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are ideological soulmates, a Bush White House would be far less disposed to nudge London on an "internal" matter than the current administration has been.
The American political scientist, Michael Barone, has characterised the Clintonesque style of foreign policy as deriving from the "culture of therapy", while that of the more isolationist tendency in the US Republican Party derives from a "culture of discipline". We have seen the difference of attitude already with Condoleezza Rice, Bush's senior foreign policy adviser, signalling that US troops will not remain in Kosovo indefinitely. National missile defence - not conflict resolution - would be a Bush administration's top priority.
Irish republicans counter this argument by pointing to Congressman Peter King's role in inserting a strong defence of the Patten Report into this year's US Republican policy platform. However, the indications are that King has cooked his goose by being a lonely Republican voice calling on Bush to concede defeat when Florida began to look uncertain. Ben Gilman, the other key Republican who has been sympathetic to Sinn Fein demands, in an unrelated move is stepping down from his key position as chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee. It would seem, therefore, that Clinton's visit next week symbolically marks the end of a sustained American involvement in Northern Irish issues.
Nevertheless, the visit has created a burden of expectation; a hope that Clinton might be able, yet again, to use some of his magic. For certain, David Trimble needs the IRA to deliver on its promise of May to completely and verifiably put all IRA arms beyond use. They were, after all, promises not only to the British government, but to the Unionist leadership as well. It will be difficult for him to sustain the power-sharing Executive beyond January otherwise.