By the time Clinton returns to Washington in mid-January, a world which is pretty skeptical of his administration’s foreignpolicy competence will have a much better sense of whether the leader of the free world is up to the job. Clinton came into office, says an adviser outside the administration, hoping that his foreign-policy team could “hold the world at bay,” while he concentrated on domestic policy. The president can no longer affect such insouciance. His trip would be demanding for someone much more sure-footed in foreign policy than Clinton has proved to be.

The president will visit Brussels for a NATO summit, Prague to meet the leaders of the Central European democracies, Moscow to talk to Boris Yeltsin and Geneva to shake hands with Syria’s President Hafez Assad. Like all presidents, Clinton wants to be hailed as a hero at each stop. Yet since the Central Europeans and the Russians want very different things from America, triumphs in Prague and Moscow, says a European diplomat, are “not necessarily mutually compatible.”

It’s lucky that Clinton likes to improvise, because at each stage of his trip, the prepared script may be have to be junked. He might arrive in Brussels to talk about NATO and find that the French want to talk about Bosnia. In Prague, he may find that the Partnership for Peace–his plan for reassuring the Central European democracies–is regarded as a brushoff, leaving them in a gray zone between East and West. “There is this feeling in Poland that history may be coming back and that people may be naively repeating the mistakes and conspiracies of the past,” says Poland’s Foreign Minister Andrzej Olechowski.

The challenge in Moscow is not just Yeltsin, but Ukraine President Leonid Kravchuk, keen to trade his nuclear weapons for American cash as if he were in a Kiev street market. And although Clinton will not meet with ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Moscow–“You are afraid that a new, honest and brave man has emerged in Russia,” Zhirinovsky taunted–he will not be able to ignore him; the shadow of a renewed Russian nationalism lies over the first week of the trip. In Geneva, where a morning is scheduled for Assad, Clinton may find that the Syrian is ready for one of his nine-hour, coffee-and-tea-drinking marathons–“bladder diplomacy,” as an aide to Secretary of State Warren Christopher calls it.

It is not just Clinton’s capacity which will be tested by the trip but that of his advisers. Led by Christopher, national-security adviser Tony Lake and U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s appointees came into office committed to some of the traditional nostrums of Democratic Party liberalism. They were keen on multilateral interventions and the use of the United Nations, anxious that other democracies should “share the burden” of world leadership but nervous about the use of force to compel policy choices.

The upshot was not, as so often claimed, a foreign policy epitomized by American disengagement from the world, but the precise opposite–a policy which asked America to do too much, without any sense of priorities. Like children wreaking havoc when nanny is on the phone, the lack of presidential leadership allowed the foreign-policy team to range freely. By summer the United States had been committed to rescuing failed states like Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti; the support of scores of U.N. missions; a strategic partnership with Russia; another one with Japan; another one with China; expanding the world trading system; asserting America’s special role, first in the Western Hemisphere and then in Asia; increasing the population of whales and limiting that of humans. Coherence came there none, unless you were a whale.

For Clinton, the getting of wisdom started in the spring, when Christopher was unable to persuade the West Europeans to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia. It continued in the fall, with the disasters in Somalia and Haiti. By the winter he had learned the lonely lesson of American leadership: neither the United Nations nor America’s allies can reshape the world without an American blueprint.

Yet as this week’s frenetic briefing has shown, even when this administration takes a lead in foreign policy, it has trouble explaining what it is trying to do. The Partnership for Peace was crafted as a compromise between administration officials who wanted to offer the prospect of early (never “immediate”) membership of NATO to the countries of Eastern Europe, and those who thought that such a policy would allow nationalists in Russia to claim that the West was once more encircling it. Under the plan, those who accept NATO’s offer of partnership will take part in exercises and joint training and progressively align their force structures with NATO. All this was unveiled in Moscow last October. U.S. officials said Yeltsin was “thrilled” with it–creating the impression, which was allowed to linger for two months, that Yeltsin had effectively vetoed NATO expansion.

In fact, as administration officials freely concede (but had rarely explained until last week) there never was the slightest chance of extending full-blown NATO security guarantees to Eastern Europe. A revision of the NATO treaty to add new members could require a two-thirds-majority vote in the Senate. The votes, for now, are just not there, in Washington or anywhere else; left to their own devices, the West European NATO members would not have offered even the partnership.

To re-establish credibility with the East Europeans, Washington insisted last week that the partnership is “a step toward adding new members to NATO” and is designed to offer the Central Europeans “the confidence that they can integrate into the West.” Christopher told NEWSWEEK that the partnership can “contemplate two quite different alternatives”: a “revanchist and nationalist” Russia, or one that “continues on the path to market reform, political reform, foreign-policy reform.” Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said last week that Clinton should be “as encouraging as possible” to the East Europeans, and NEWSWEEK has learned that an old Bush-administration plan to offer a free-trade agreement to Eastern Europe was recently re-examined by Clinton’s advisers. Though the idea was rejected, the president went to Europe ready to propose an international initiative to reduce barriers to East Europe’s exports.

If Clinton makes plain in Prague that he wants to bind Eastern Europe to the West, will he have trouble in Moscow? Not necessarily; Valentin Kuptsov, the deputy chairman of the Communist Party (which of course opposes NATO expansion), admits, “This is not an issue close to people’s hearts. [They] are more concerned with the economy, crime and other immediate problems.” But Clinton will certainly find that the new Russian government, which may be announced this week. is less reform-minded than the old one and that Boris Yeltsin, the totem of Clinton’s Russian policy, faces strong opposition in Parliament. Even without meeting Zhirinovsky, the Americans Will hear from him. Alexei Mitrofanov, who describes himself as Zhirinovsky’s “shadow foreign minister,” says that, “Our goal is to unite Russia in the boundaries of the old Soviet Union, including the Baltic states.”

If such views take hold in Russia next year, the education of Bill Clinton will have to move from the classroom to the more demanding school of hard knocks. He has already learned that the United Nations cannot deliver all that it promises and that “Europe” is just a geographical expression, not a unified polity which can help him shape the world. One year ago he did not think he would also have to learn the brinkmanship, nerve and determination that was demanded of America’s presidents in the cold war. Now he knows better.

AID

Moscow

Clinton needs to stem the political fallout from December’s elections and bolster President Boris Yeltsin’s beleaguered image. Washington wants Yeltsin to continue implementing tough economic and political reforms. But the Russian leader must carefully calibrate how much more economic pain his people can stand. Too much and they will turn in increasing numbers to the right-wing nationalism of extremists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Mideast peace

Geneva

When he meets with Syrian President Assad, Clinton needs to raise the delicate issue of Syria’s repeated involvement with international terrorism–like the bombing of U.S. marines in Beirut in 1983–without offending a key Mideast player. Clinton must also ensure that Assad, who was almost completely excluded from the Israel-PLO negotiations, will help enforce the embattled peace plan. Assad, in turn, wants U.S. help in regaining the Golan Heights from Israel.

NATO

Brussels

Clinton must allay the concerns of two unhappy constituencies as he tries to revitalize the cold-war relic. He needs to sell his Partnership for Peace–a plan for limited military partnerships–to newly democratized Eastern European countries that hunger for full NATO membership. At the same time, he must assuage the fears of NATO’s 16 members, uneasy about being military allies with former members of the Warsaw Pact.