The special relationship is knowing when to say you're sorry: Caught in a jam of would-be advisers, this US president needs time to think about Europe, says Professor Donald Cameron Watt

FAILURE of Europe and the United States to agree on a common policy towards Bosnia has led to speculation about the future of the transatlantic relationship. The recent tour of Europe's capitals by Warren Christopher, US Secretary of State, was widely regarded as less than succesful. Joe Biden, who has chosen to nail his flag to the Bosnian issue, rather as Tam Dalyell MP did to the sinking of the Belgrano, made some widely reported comments about European pusillanimity.

On this side of the Atlantic, one could hear similar remarks about American unwillingness to descend below 10,000ft, a case of pouring oil on troubled flames. Efforts were made to depict the Foreign Secretary's laid-back unflappability as a cold-blooded indifference to the mass murders and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; a gay old time was had by American Anglophobes and European anti- Americans alike.

Headline-seeking sub-editors naturally asked: is this the end of the special relationship? Has Nato a future? And other equally spine-chilling questions. The answer is: not necessarily. Though we have been here before.

On the whole, historians have an undistinguished record as prophets. If history were the science a generation of misguided Frenchman have tried to make it, there would be no practising historians; they would all be making fortunes on the stock market or at the races. All this historian can do is point to the patterns observable in the past. The alarums that have beset inter-Atlantic relations these past few weeks have precedents in every new American administration since that of President Eisenhower. Even in the days before nomination for each party's candidacy for president was put up for grabs among competing party outsiders, and tales of ambitious whiz kids whose political horizons extended no further than cultivation of marginal voters in marginal states, new American regimes always began by declaring a lack of commitment to the special relationship, and that their No 1 priority was not necessarily European.

Each new president, in fact, arrived with a kitchen cabinet of advisers jostling for power, their knowledge of world politics intellectually disadvantaged, to put it mildly, and their arrogance in victory leading them to resent those from the US foreign policy community who offered themselves belatedly to the new regime.

New presidents, as opposed to old hang-arounds such as Johnson, Nixon, or Bush, have to spend at least six months dumping those who have engineered their victory, and learning that, out there in Congress and overseas alike, are the people whose goodwill and understanding are essential to their being remembered for more than their successful election.

They have to learn, too, that what goes down well in the soundbites of the television hustings is largely irrelevant to foreign politicians, who have their own electorates and agendas.

Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan all learnt this. Bush did not need teaching, only encouraging. Carter began to learn it, but was misled by Professor Brzezinski, with his cerebral terminological fantasies. Mrs Carter never did.

One of the things they learnt was that successive British prime ministers, with the exception of Ted Heath who was genuinely indifferent to the United States, saw most matters from the same perspectives as they did; were willing to co-operate with them; and had taken the trouble to master all the feed-in and plug-in points in the US policy process. But the relationship with Nato, with Germany and, above all, with Britain, had to be learnt. It may be special, but it is not like riding a bicycle.

There are always difficulties in the relationship - some psychological, some institutional, many economic. There are strong antipathetic forces ranging from deep-rooted cultural xenophobia among the common peoples to the professional cultivation by intellectuals of alien scapegoats. Even Mrs Thatcher, who usually regarded professional anti-Americans as open-season targets, could fall into a ferocious row or two with President Reagan - over the trans-European pipeline, for example. Employment, protectionism, the survival of strategic industries, the ups and downs of the dollar and sterling were all constant sources of danger. And the latest round of Gatt talks has been incubating such trouble for years.

These are now compounded by the fact that, relatively speaking, Mr Major's cabinet is not much further out of the international nursery than Bill Clinton's administration, and shares with him a confusion between conviction and calculation politics. (The French cabinet - indeed, much of the German cabinet - is even more newborn.)

This ought not to be true of Douglas Hurd, who remains somewhat of a mystery. Maybe he shares with Mr Heath a distaste for American political life. He certainly never gives much sign of relishing, let alone revelling in, it. And it is difficult to see him cultivating the type of intimacy that some of his predecessors have had with secretaries of state, let alone presidents.

The result is that the desirable degree of warmth in relations between London and Washington, let alone understanding and companionship, has still to be puffed into flame. Mr Hurd's professional advisers in the Foreign Office excelled themselves last week in damage limitation. A public crucifixion of the criminal idiots in Whitehall who collaborated - and, worse, let it be known that they had collaborated - with Mr Bush's efforts last year to smear Bill Clinton out of the electoral race, is still called for. It is not only the President, but his wife, after all, who has to learn how to play the special relationship.

The truth is that America needs Nato: without it, the American entree into Europe is precarious. Nato needs the United States: without it, there is nothing to balance Germany against the fears that its political past may be being resurrected. US money and US trade are as vital to European economic and financial recovery as European recovery is to that of the the US. Brussels, after all, is as easily hijacked by determined, frightened, subsidised and selfish minorities as ever was Congress.

The traffic jam in President Clinton's relations with Europe is not unprecedented. The noise from Washington is that of numerous would-be drivers of the American coach of state caught in the jam, unsure of their way, and all honking their horns at once. Bosnia is the occasion, not the cause.

The jam can be resolved. It has been done before. But such resolution needs a positive lead, a positive demonstration from both sides of the Atlantic. The simultaneous crises in domestic politics evident in London, Moscow, Paris, Bonn, Brussels and Rome do not help. President Clinton will have to shoulder the burden of resolving things. He will need patience and understanding, and possibly our prayers, as well as inspiration, to see him through. But there is nothing to suggest that he will not make it.

The author is Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics.

(Photographs omitted)