NEWS ANALYSIS : White House Relearns Benefits of Global Role : Leadership: President’s welcome in Europe plays well at home. Aides hope it will help his overall image.

As President Clinton ranged across Europe last week, from the pomp of Buckingham Palace to a delirious welcome from the Irish people to a respectful salute from U.S. Army units in Germany, his aides couldn’t stop grinning at each other.

They had rediscovered an old lesson they once seemed to ignore: For a President, being Leader of the Free World can be both fun and politically rewarding.

One of Clinton’s top political strategists, James Carville, delightedly telephoned the White House on Thursday--when network news programs showed the President cheered by thousands in Northern Ireland--to proclaim it “the best day of television he’s had since he came to the White House.”

“The effect of those television pictures is to make the American people ask themselves: Why are all these people cheering?” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said. “They’re saying to themselves that the guy must be doing something right.”

At a news conference Sunday in Madrid, just before his return to Washington, Clinton was less nakedly political, saying the trip showed the need for American leadership and adding his hope that “the American people and Congress would respond.”

But when a reporter asked whether the trip would strengthen his hand in the battle with Congress over the federal budget, the President could not resist the bait. His reception in Europe, Clinton asserted, holds a lesson for Congress: Don’t cut too many federal programs.

“We should do nothing that would send the signal to the world that we are less successful economically,” he said.

On his five-day European trip, Clinton assumed a new role for a man who came to office promising a single-minded focus on domestic issues: the President as global peacemaker.

Part of his aim was to revel in an unaccustomed string of diplomatic victories: progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians, an unexpectedly durable truce between the Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, and a U.S.-brokered deal among Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

White House aides also hope that the reflected glow of those successes will make Americans feel better about Clinton’s next--and riskiest--foreign enterprise: sending 20,000 U.S. troops to Bosnia to help enforce last month’s peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio.

But there was a broader political goal as well: As American voters see Clinton in his role of commander in chief--and see him win a level of adulation from foreigners that he rarely enjoys at home--his aides hope his overall image as a leader can only benefit.

“My father used to say that all politics is local,” said former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Thomas P. O’Neill III (son of the late Democratic Speaker of the House), who accompanied Clinton in Northern Ireland. “Now we’ll add: All politics must be peacemaking.”

Even the nominally Republican mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, was caught up in the spell.

“He’s trying to be the peace President, and that’s good from a political point of view,” Riordan said in the capital of Northern Ireland, Belfast. “Clinton isn’t a Catholic, but when people see him being cheered in southern Ireland, that can’t hurt when Catholics make up something like 30% of the vote.”

Last week’s television pictures were intended for all voters, however, not just Roman Catholics.

Highlighting such a successful venture into the foreign policy realm helps Clinton across the board in two ways. One involves the issue his political advisers call “stature”--the lingering question in the minds of many voters of whether this 48-year-old President is up to the job.

The second addresses a problem Clinton has faced since Republicans seized control of Congress last year: finding a field where he can demonstrate that he is still a powerful political presence.

The GOP ascendancy robbed Clinton of his chance to enact any more of the massive domestic agenda he brought to Washington. Welfare reform is mired in partisan battles, health care reform is dead and the White House is fighting a rear-guard action to preserve at least a remnant of trademark Clinton programs such as national service and anti-crime efforts.

But once Clinton steps off Air Force One abroad, his presidency still radiates all the power of bygone days, commanding respect from foreign prime ministers and near-adulation from their people.

At home, Clinton sometimes has difficulty commanding television time for news conferences; overseas, he commands breathless live reporting on his every word.

In short, a President who won his office in part by accusing George Bush of spending too much time abroad is finding that he now wants to be a foreign policy President too.

When Clinton came to the White House in 1993, he was so wary of spending time on foreign policy that he cut his daily national security briefing from an hour to 50 minutes--to save the extra 10 minutes for domestic issues.

But during the past year, aides say, he has tackled foreign policy with new enthusiasm.

“He’s gotten much better at it,” a senior adviser said. “When he started, he didn’t pay much attention to implementation; he thought deciding on a policy was the hard part and implementation would take care of itself. But he’s learned that lesson now.”

Clinton has learned several foreign policy lessons, from Somalia--where 42 U.S. troops were killed in an ill-designed mission, including 18 in an infamous ambush--to Haiti and Bosnia.

Somalia taught him the need for constant attention to the way policy is implemented, including direct U.S. command of American forces. Haiti, where a brutal military regime surrendered once it was clear Clinton was willing to invade, taught him that the weight of U.S. military power can produce decisive results when used in decisive ways.

“I think the American people should know that we have a unique responsibility at this moment in history,” the President said Sunday. “After the Cold War, the United States was left with a certain superpower status and a certain economic standing that imposes on us great responsibilities.”

But even within that high-minded approach, there is still room to make an old-fashioned political point. When Press Secretary McCurry was asked to sum up the trip, he told reporters that Clinton’s “leadership reverberated in Europe at a time when there is enormous concern . . . about isolationism in America.”

“There’s a very strong isolationist tendency within [the Republican] caucus and within the Republican presidential debate,” he added.