PRESIDENT Clinton may win international acclaim by a successful White House summit to restore peace between Israel and the Palestinians but if it goes wrong he could be in serious electoral trouble.
His Republican opponent, former Senator Bob Dole, can only look on while the President gets world headlines as a peacemaker but if violence returns to the West Bank in spite of his efforts, this will be counted as a foreign policy failure and leave Mr Clinton vulnerable. Mr Dole is just itching to get a foreign policy issue on which to attack the President for "inexperience" but had to hold back on the recent Iraqi crisis once US military personnel became involved.
But it is US diplomacy, not lives, which is at stake in the latest Middle East crisis and Mr Dole will be watching for an opportunity to portray Mr Clinton's policy as a failure. Mr Dole had been critical of Mr Clinton for letting the Iraqi crisis develop without taking preventive action. Now he can try and fault the President for taking his eye off the Middle East situation a second time and failing to defuse the build up of tension.
Until the summit was announced yesterday, the President had been avoiding personal intervention in the crisis and leaving it to his Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher, at the UN last week, and his diplomats to handle it. There was even muted criticism that the President was failing to speak directly to the Israeli prime minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat.
But the truth is that the Clinton administration's influence over Israel has been much weakened since it backed Mr Shimon Peres over Mr Netanyahu in the last election and relations between Mr Clinton and the new right wing Israeli leader are cool in spite of two White House meetings. The President had a close relationship with Mr Yitzhak Rabin and wept when he was assassinated.
This diminished influence was shown last week when Mr Netanyahu ignored US pleadings and opened the controversial tunnel at the Temple Mount. Then Mr Netanyahu ignored US advice to close the tunnel for an indefinite period to defuse the tensions with the Palestinians.
The tunnel incident was yet another blow to US diplomacy which has not yet persuaded Mr Netanyahu to withdraw Israeli troops from Hebron on the West Bank as agreed in the Oslo accords signed by Mr Rabin and Mr Arafat. When Mr Clinton has been questioned by the media on this, he has replied weakly that Mr Netanyahu has said he will respect the Oslo accords.
US diplomatic efforts over the last few days concentrated on getting Mr Netanyahu and Mr Arafat to meet at a border site between Israel and the West Bank or in Cairo with President Mubarak as mediator. Again, Mr Clinton kept aloof from the intensive negotiations but was regularly briefed by Mr Christopher.
But while the US was angry at Mr Netanyahu for ignoring advice and opening the tunnel, it had not much time for the efforts of the UN Security Council to get involved by passing an anti Israel resolution. The US abstained on the motion after having threatened to veto any wording that named Israel as in the wrong.
No US President wants to conduct a re election campaign and deal with an international crisis at the same time. It carries the risk of failure.
This showed when President Clinton announced that the first Cruise missile strikes on Iraq had resulted in "mission achieved" against President Saddam Hussein's incursion into the Kurdish area of Iraq. But then, embarrassingly, a second strike had to be ordered and this was followed by large scale deployment of naval and air forces and the sending of 5,000 troops to Kuwait.
The President's touch was seen to be uncertain and prospect of the painfully negotiated peace accords between Israel and the PLO, for which Mr Clinton took much credit, unravelling within weeks of the US election was unnerving for the White House.
A White House summit seems to be the only way to get the two sides together. But now the President has to assume the mantle of peace maker with no guarantee that he can succeed.