At the White House St Patrick's Day party last year, President Clinton promised that this year would be the "biggest party ever" if a peace agreement had been reached in Northern Ireland.
This year will be the biggest party ever as White House officials struggle to keep down the record number of Irish-Americans clamouring to get in, but what will there be to celebrate?
It is now assumed that the March 10th deadline for handing over power to the new multi-party executive will not be met because the decommissioning issue is proving unsolvable. As the unionist, Sinn Fein and SDLP leaders prepare to converge on Washington, the spotlight turns once again on President Clinton to tackle the latest mess.
It is an uncanny re-run of last year when an agreement involving the UUP and Sinn Fein seemed impossible and all eyes were on David Trimble and Gerry Adams.
In the end the Northern Ireland leaders made their way back to Belfast well wined, dined and flattered but with no instant solution from the most powerful world leader. The Clinton message was to plead with the politicians to get their act together. This year, the message will be virtually the same. It is the parties themselves - in this case the UUP and Sinn Fein - who have to solve this problem.
As the Northern Ireland Minister of State, Mr Paul Murphy, said in Washington this week: "There is no substitute, none whatsoever, for the parties themselves to resolve this issue." He conceded that the role of President Clinton had been "enormously significant" in helping to bring about the Belfast Agreement last year.
While the President rarely misses an opportunity to cite the agreement as an example of a foreign policy success, he takes a carefully neutral tone on the decommissioning impasse. In a foreign policy speech in San Francisco last week, he said: "We will keep pressing the leaders [in Northern Ireland] to observe not just the letter but the spirit of the Good Friday accord." He said the same thing to the political leaders themselves last December.
This was decoded as meaning that while David Trimble should not wield a veto over implementing the terms of the agreement, neither should Gerry Adams and the IRA sit on their hands over decommissioning. Behind the scenes, the Americans are not sitting on their hands in trying to help the UUP and Sinn Fein reach a compromise on decommissioning.
Larry Butler, a White House staff member who handles Northern Ireland matters under the National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, and his assistant, Jim Steinberg, was in Belfast last week but more to take soundings than float solutions.
"There will be no holding of feet to the fire" when the Northern Ireland leaders are in the White House this time, a diplomatic observer says.
"The deal will not be done here," another Washington diplomat says bluntly. But there will be discussion of the "choreography" which could yet reconcile the UUP precondition of a beginning to the handover of weapons and the IRA refusal to countenance a "surrender".
The President is expected in his meetings with the political leaders to emphasise the folly of letting the agreement be wrecked over decommissioning. He will probe the individual positions to see if any flexibility is possible in working out a compromise which would involve Gen John de Chastelain.
Irish-American organisations and politicians back the Sinn Fein line that David Trimble is flouting the agreement by making decommissioning a precondition for their entry into the executive. But the White House, which had some sympathy for that view, now knows that the situation is not that simple and a compromise must be sought if Mr Trimble and the agreement are to survive.
Some Irish-Americans would like to see former Senator George Mitchell make a comeback to help rescue the agreement. After all, it was he who came up with the original proposal for "parallel" decommissioning which could yet be the way out of the present dilemma.
If there is anything President Clinton can do to save the agreement before next Good Friday he will do it. But he, like Mr Murphy, knows that even the US might cannot make Northern Ireland politicians do anything that would make them self-destruct.