Introduction

The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) is viewed as a successful example of Bill Clinton's foreign policy. Clinton's rhetoric about Northern Ireland established both his opposition to violence and his view that it was comparable with other situations, such as those in Bosnia, the Middle East and Haiti. His engagement with the ‘Troubles’ thus represented a new and broader mission for US foreign policy, which recognised that it had to reflect a new era of globalisation and interdependence. However, credit for the peace process should not be afforded only to the President's activities. The Clinton administration coincided with a willingness by unionists and nationalists to secure a sustainable peace, an acknowledgement by the republican movement that the war between the IRA and the British government had resulted in a stalemate, and that the ‘armed struggle’ had negative electoral consequences for Sinn Féin.

Clinton's approach to Northern Ireland is also revealing because of the impact that it had on his administration and, more broadly, America's anti-terrorism policies before 11 September 2001, particularly the internal power struggle between the NSC and the State Department. The focus of the academic literature on the Clinton administration and the ‘peace process’ is the internationalisation of the Northern Ireland question and the ‘Troubles’, meaning the involvement of other countries, particularly the US, in chairing and facilitating discussions about the development and implementation of governmental institutions and agreements, including, for instance, the decommissioning of arms and how the peace process began and unfolded. The peace process has also been contextualised by scholarship that argues that the ‘Troubles’ were indirectly sustained by the Cold War. The ending of the Cold War ultimately ended the environment for revolutionary republicanism to thrive and turned the West's attention to national and ethnic conflicts such as that in Northern Ireland. Subsequently, the importance of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ was essentially downgraded after the Cold War. Furthermore, Anglo- Irish relations benefited from improving trust within the process of European integration. Therefore, this chapter contends that, while Clinton was a significant factor in the GFA, his importance stems from an ability to take advantage of the opportunity for an agreement in Northern Ireland that was the result of a combination of various historical processes.