Overseas, however, the congregation is always attentive; that’s one of the nice things about being president of the United States. Hence the irony: the man who first won the presidency as someone who understood domestic policy better than anyone else of his generation has been forced to seek his memorial in foreign policy. A conversation in the Oval Office last week with myself and three other reporters concentrated almost entirely on international affairs. Clinton’s message to the world is plain: “We all have to define our greatness in the future in ways that do not entail the necessity of dominating our neighbors.”

But even in foreign policy, things aren’t what they were. In the late 1940s, Americans could remake a wrecked world. Asked if he ever wished he’d been born earlier and served on Secretary of State George Marshall’s staff, Clinton said, “I think it would have been a very exciting time.” His wife, he said with a laugh, once said that he had been born “30 years too late.”

In truth, there’s plenty that Clinton can still do. It would be quite a thing to be remembered as the president who put in place structures that made it all but impossible for Europeans to suck the rest of the world into their own vicious quarrels. And Clinton might. “What we’re trying to do,” the president said, “is to create a world where the barking dogs of the 20th century don’t yelp in the 21st.” On his European trip this week, the president will look back, commemorating the Marshall Plan. But he will look forward, too: he is to sign an agreement between NATO and Russia that will pave the way for Central and Eastern European nations to join the Atlantic alliance.

For Clinton, American “leadership” is the essential element in exorcising the ghosts of Europe’s past. Part of that leadership lies in convincing Americans to expand their security umbrella to NATO’s supplicants. Part of it involves dealing with a Europe that is far more concerned with things that an American president cannot much influence (like monetary union) than with things that he can (like NATO). Even more sadly for Clinton, the wise men of the years after 1945 had unique advantages that he does not. Today, said the president, “we’re not coming out of the ashes of war . . . and therefore no one can speak with the authority, if you will, that victors in a war can.”

Indeed, even after the horrors of World War II, it was far from easy to persuade Americans to remain engaged in Europe’s future; it helped to have the Russians as bogeymen. Scare tactics won’t work today. As the administration prepares to argue for NATO expansion before the Senate, it does so when the nation has rarely felt more secure from the threat of war. The bomb silos on the Great Plains are on their way to becoming curious museums. Clinton recognizes this. One of the aims of his visit to Europe, he says, is to convince Americans that “we are going to be safer, we’re going to be more prosperous, the world will be a more decent place if we maintain our engagement.”

Will that message fly? Though Republicans control both houses of Congress, Clinton worked well with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott on the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Treaty last month and notes that Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich has “always had . . . an expansive view of the responsibilities of the United States.” But there will always be some in the Congress who are isolationist at heart, and others who regard any concession to Russia as a betrayal.

This much is clear. If the Senate endorses NATO expansion, Clinton will be able to look forward to enjoyable trips to Europe. In five years, he has gone from a man little known outside American political groupies to one with powerful friends abroad. He will meet this week with Tony Blair, the new British prime minister, whom he has come to know well. By the time he leaves office, he will quite possibly have met Boris Yeltsin more times than all other American presidents and all other Russian leaders combined got together, and speaks of him warmly as a “true democrat.” As for Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor and favorite Clinton dining companion, the president says, simply, that he is a “sort of role model.” That implies that the man who once made a career out of eating Southern barbecue by the plateful will, in his retirement, dine on stuffed sow’s stomach. It’s not that different.