The pressure comes, not from international politics where there has ceased to be any power capable of matching muscles with the US, nor from a Presidency weakened by admissions of sexual misconduct, but from within.The reason why the US negotiating authorities cannot let security become a threat is that it may well be the last straw for a population bothered by a strange ambivalence towards the spectacular success of the American economy in recent times.

Riding on an information technology explosion, the US has seen a sudden rise in prosperity at the top end of society. Hi-tech exponents are earning exponentially more than they ever used to. Seattle, the home of Microsoft and Amazon.Com is the newest boomtown, where whizkids are raking in higher returns on intelligence than was ever dreamed of. Wall Street has recognised this, and internet stocks have spiralled to what some analysts are calling a "new valuation paradigm".

Simultaneously, the conclusion of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and the increasing flow of free trade around the world have nudged employers such as General Motors into shifting thousands of jobs elsewhere. Recent huge strikes have been on this issue, and the insecurity is growing in spite of extensive retraining, refocussing programs undertaken by the US government, and strong campaigning for higher education to ensure that they can fill the skill gap at the top end. The worries have translated into substantial anti-free trade pressure, so that despite two years of wrangling, President Bill Clinton has not managed to get fast-track authority for trade negotiation from the US House of Representatives, where Congressmen are acutely feeling the pressure from below.

That is not where the economic insecurity of the middle class ends. A recent statistical study has shown, real wages of middle class and blue collar workers have actually declined for the two decades preceding 1995. Paul Krugman, eminent economist at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology recently came up with a telling study. He found that the general satisfaction in American society has declined substantially over the last half-a-century. He showed that in the 1950s, people at the 50th percentile of the US population (that is, those at the level where they had 50 per cent of the population below them) owned a car, a telephone, and a television.

That was the extent, generally, of how far middle class prosperity would go. In 1998, people at the 12th percentile of the population (that is, those with 88 per cent of the population more prosperous than them) own a car, a television, rent an apartment, probably own a long-distance telephone line and a personal computer: meaning thereby, that those living at higher percentile levels, say the family at the 50th percentile, does not have enough of a reason to feel specially happy at its position in society.The result: rather than Have Nots envying the Haves, it is the "Haves" who are giving the "Have Mores" poisonous looks.

The situation is further complicated by immigration. There is a constant inflow of people willing to settle for lower wages, and the AFL-CIO, the trade union which seeks to integrate workers around the US is having a tough time sifting the legal from illegal immigrants, sometimes fighting for the latter as well as the former, making sure that employers, in trying to make quick money, do not sink below all norms in wages. The AFL-CIO is also struggling to bring hi-tech workers into its ambit: they are not particularly willing to come into the union fold and risk offending employers who are paying the earth anyway.

In fact, some of the middle class disenchantment with the economic set-up is obvious from the fact that the Federal union has lost a large chunk of members.

In this situation the last thing the American system can take is a security panic. The US is unlikely to question the unfettered progress of high technology, so that more middle class manufacturing jobs will be in peril over the years. America will push for free trade, though less than before, in the interest of its multinational corporations. It must therefore ensure, therefore, that at least the protection afforded to its citizens by the centuries-old geographical insularity of the civilisation is protected.Otherwise, disenchantment with what is essentially a situation could turn into anger at the system at the heart of America's greatness.