All around Washington, from the Senate foreign relations committee to NATO embassies, they say that the days of Tony Lake as President Clinton's national security adviser are numbered.


Maybe. And Lake deserves his share of the blame of the criticism washing over the Clinton administration's stewardship of foreign policy. But even as the political sniping increases, this cerebral former university professor is thinking deeply about the new American dilemma.


His thesis is that Clinton's foreign policy, including its capacity to intervene in crises like Haiti, North Korea and Bosnia, is constrained by a mood of isolationism unprecedented since the 1930s.


Lake believes that the White House's international woes were not the result of its handling of any single crisis, but rooted in the confusion that followed the end of the familiar disciplines and priorities of the Cold War. "It is like the late 1940s. We need to define a new policy of American engagement with the world, but we are doing so in the domestic political circumstances of the isolationist mood of the 1920s and 1930s, when the American public saw no clear international threat."


Lake said that it took five years for the United States to develop a consensus around the policy of containing the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War, and a new post-Cold War consensus would also take years to form.


"In the Cold War, all foreign-policy debate revolved around the single question of containing the Soviet threat, so the debate was coherent. Now we debate not only the answers in foreign policy, but also the questions," Lake said.


"How far will the United States be involved in the world, when there is no central threat to our interests? In our view, the stakes are just as high as they were at the start of the Cold War. Nationally, there is a greater than usual sense of insecurity, and so there is a greater sense of dissatisfaction when certainty is not provided in an uncertain world. This was also true of the last years of the Bush administration, after the victory in Desert Storm."


Lake makes a cogent case. And to his credit, he did try to define a broad international strategy for the Clinton administration. Looking for a concept to replace the Cold War strategy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, Lake came up with the idea of "enlargement," widening the family of democratic and free-market nations.


"Enlargement" did not catch on as a buzzword, but it became the basis for NATO's Partnership of Peace. It is also the rationale behind the planned Western Hemisphere summit meeting that President Clinton will host in Miami later this year, where he will hold out the prospect of extending the North American free-trade zone to the rest of South and Central America.


So whatever his job prospects, Lake can claim to have done his bit against the new isolationists by extending the U.S. commitment in Europe, and opening the promise of the United States as the world's fattest market to the poor and ambitious countries in America's back yard.


And if he does leave Washington before the end of this year, Lake will not leave broken-hearted. He has some cows waiting for him at home. Most of Washington's high and mighty drape their offices with photographs of their meetings with world leaders. Not Tony Lake. His desk is graced with a pin-up of his herd of dairy cattle back at his Massachusetts farm.