DESTABILIZED EUROPE: PRESIDENT CLINTON WILL FIND PRICE ISN'T PUNY

In policy terms, Bill Clinton was scheduled to be the most domestically-oriented president since Franklin Roosevelt. Having won because of rampant economic dissatisfaction and having developed a self-taught expertise on a wide range of domestic policy areas, Clinton was not going to succumb to the temptations and glories of commander-in-chief-itis. He knew on which side his political bread was buttered.

Then came Somalia and now Bosnia. Somalia is manageable. Probably not as quickly as the "We'll have all our boys home by Inauguration Day" fiction.

The tragedy of Bosnia isn't so manageable. It constitutes the diciest, most dreadful foreign policy legacy of the Bush years. It is not unusual for an outgoing president to leave behind an ominous international nightmare to his successor. Franklin Roosevelt bequeathed Harry Truman the decision to drop the atomic bomb and to win the ultimate peace. Truman gave Dwight Eisenhower Korea. Eisenhower handed over Vietnam to John Kennedy and that never-ending catastrophe was passed on, in turn, to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Every president succeeding Truman, from Eisenhower to George Bush, inherited the Cold War.

Lucky Bill Clinton, so it appeared, was to have some breathing room on foreign policy. There would be time to get acquainted, time to adjust, time to learn, time to think, time to evaluate and time to decide. But in Bosnia, time has about run out and unless the new president acts, the Butcher of Belgrade, Slobodon Milosevic, will complete his horrific genocidal slaughter.

There is a seemingly endless supply of evil, horror and tragedy in this world of ours. America can't deal with it all - much as our humanitarian heart strings might tend to encourage us to do so. We will judge the limitless opportunities to intervene using a less than precise criteria for selection. Under the geopolitical microscope, evil, horror and tragedy can sometimes take on a chilling, numbing sameness.

But Europe is different - it always has been in 20th century American policy. It is not just our own European background. World security depends on stability in the relationship between the United States and Europe as in no other transcontinental relationship (excepting perhaps the oil of the Persian Gulf). The horrors in Bosnia are increasingly destabilizing. A destabilized Europe is, without doubt, a threat to American national security interests.

It is one of those curious coincidences of history that inexperienced Bill Clinton takes power when the seasoned titans of Europe have lost power. Francois Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl and John Major have each lost the respect of their electorates. Even if they had the guts of Margaret Thatcher, they do not have the political base to act decisively and vigorously. Can the newest of new boys on the block lead a politically ossified Europe into taking actions it should have taken a year or more ago?

Phrases like "quagmire" and "bogged down" understandably haunt any decision-making process where military force is involved. Bosnia isn't Grenada, Panama or Somalia. To say that Europe and America are incapable of acting now in the face of a bloodletting of historic magnitude is to say that the United States will keep the peace only if the price is puny and the danger is non-existent. The destabilization of Europe necessarily carries a far greater price and poses much greater dangers.