Leading Article: Enlightened pragmatism

HISTORY has been denied. Lions have sat down with lambs. They have not exactly lain down with each other, although they may have kipped on the sofa in adjacent rooms. But they have agreed a text setting out the rules for their peaceful coexistence in the future.

More than two thousand people have died in Northern Ireland since the last attempt at a settlement in 1974 and, though there will be terrorist killings over the next 24 years, they will surely be much fewer. That is an achievement in search of superlative adjectives. It is premature to begin apportioning praise, and not a little premature to talk about Nobel Peace Prizes. But it is worth examining the conjunction of forces which has allowed such a disparate shortlist of individuals to reject the imperatives of history. For, if Tony Blair really felt the hand of history on his shoulder last week, the important fact is that he managed to shake it off again.

So what made peace possible? There have been social and economic changes in Northern Ireland; there have been changes to the internal structures of republicanism, unionism and loyalism; there has been a British government elected without Irish baggage and with a huge Commons majority; and there has been the passage of time. But one factor which has been too little remarked on is the role of the United States. Indeed, "To Mo and America" might be the fitting toast this weekend. Peace in Northern Ireland is a tangible refutation of those who argue that the special relationship is a sham.

There is a special relationship between Ireland and America which is just as deep-rooted in history as that between America and Great Britain. The American war of independence inspired Irish nationalism - then a united movement of Protestants and Roman Catholics - and the affinity between the American republic and Irish republicanism has endured for 200 years. By the start of the Troubles, it had become a notional link, devoid of understanding. One of the most terrifying and intractable problems has been the ignorance of the Irish diaspora in New York which funds the IRA. The power of the "Irish lobby" of voters with Irish names in the American system has ensured that the White House has long had a Green tinge.

During the time of the Reagan-Thatcher axis, the special relationship did no more than mitigate this malign influence. President Reagan resisted pressure from the Irish government to make a united Ireland an object of US foreign policy. And Mrs Thatcher was very reluctant to allow any role to Dublin in the North's affairs. When John Major modulated British policy, he managed at the same time to offend Bill Clinton by lending Conservative party support to his opponent's election campaign. It was not until Mr Blair's election that a flexible British government coincided with a fruitful personal relationship between the leaders of the US and the UK.

That is not to decry Mr Major's achievement. He ended the British government's long refusal to accept a third-country chairman for the peace talks. And it was in his time that both the British government and the Ulster Unionists took seriously the need to lobby American opinion, to counter republican propaganda. But it took Mr Blair to turn the American function in the equation from negative to positive. Where Mr Clinton had been elected on the crudest Green rhetoric, and where he had snubbed Mr Major by giving Gerry Adams a visa, Mr Blair managed, so cleverly no one really noticed, to recruit the glamour and power of America to the cause of peace.

Mr Clinton became convinced that his place in history depended on securing a settlement. So he persuaded Senator George Mitchell to stay as talks chairman rather than becoming baseball commissioner - a job in America that is scarcely a rung down from the presidency. And Mr Blair treated the pro-republican Congress leaders, from Edward Kennedy down, as if they were floating Tory voters in a Basildon focus group. By the time of his visit to Washington in February, he had them eating out of his hand. For those who have been dismissive of President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair's joint search for the "third way", this weekend's breakthrough should give pause. The ideological content of their seminars may be thin but, look around you, enlightened pragmatism has a lot to recommend it.