Clinton's Legacy: He's No Teddy Roosevelt or Harry Truman

The conventional wisdom on Clinton's legacy is already congealing. He'll be credited for presiding over the longest economic expansion in the county's history--and stained with the follies that led to his impeachment. But historians are likely to focus on questions that get little attention today. The president may end up being treated far more harshly because of how he played the hand that history dealt him. He was elected at a momentous moment of great national challenge and opportunity that the nation, beguiled by prosperity and bemused by partisan posturing, has largely squandered.

Clinton was the first president elected at the end of the 40-year Cold War. After any great war, the historic challenges are clear: a settlement with the vanquished, creating conditions for global economic growth, building a system to keep the peace and urging the victorious to grasp the opportunities and challenges posed by peace. The disastrous peace after World War I taught the perils of getting this wrong; the aftermath of World War II demonstrated the potential of getting it mostly right. By this measure, the Clinton presidency may well be found wanting.

The hash made of the peace with Russia goes without saying. A great nation has been reduced to barter. Life expectancy plummets; plagues, poverty and suicides soar. The heralded transition to free markets has turned into a blatant looting of a country by Mafia tongs and robber barons.

Russia was not ours to lose. But like any victor in a longstanding role, the U.S. had major responsibility for postwar Russian reconstruction. We set the terms and scope of assistance the new Russian leaders received. Those terms were tied to a remarkably dogmatic belief in the magic of markets. The U.S. pushed the Russians to make their currency instantly convertible and to sell off public assets in a "big bang" privatization. The results were catastrophic. Russia was held to far harsher terms than Germany after World War II. The U.S. helped execute a peace that was surely as ruinous as that imposed on Germany after World War I. The price has yet to be paid.

The administration pursued a similar laissez-faire doctrine in constructing the post-Cold War global economic order. Faced with the challenge of integrating hundreds of millions of new workers and consumers into the burgeoning global market, the administration peddled financial deregulation, floating currencies and free trade. Private, not public, investment and loans would provide capital for development. Under U.S. pressure, successful East Asian countries began to open their financial markets. The destructive force of the resulting flood of short-term speculative capital contributed directly to the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan get high marks for staving off a global depression, but that does not hide the roots of the failure. In recent speeches, the president has begun to outline an ambitious and far-sighted agenda for regulating the global marketplace, including curbs on speculation, enforcement of core worker rights and environmental protections and new forms of corporate accountability. But historians will surely focus more on his policy than his rhetoric.