Bill Clinton's Foreign Policy Legacy

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THERE WILL BE a Bill Clinton foreign policy legacy and it will be positive, despite substantive critiques and the ravings of the hard-core right. The legacy will essentially be determined and evaluated in the terms established by Ronald Reagan in his first campaign for the presidency: "Are you better off now than you were eight years ago?" The answer is "yes," but it's not a simple yes.

The trouble with using the "better off" standard is that the world itself is not the same as it was eight years ago, and a foreign policy to deal with it is working against a moving target. Yale University historian John Gaddis criticized Clinton's foreign policy in 1999 as being one that ignored the tradition of preserving the sovereignty of great powers and the assumption of a structured client state system. However, the international strategic paradigm has shifted dramatically in the past 10 years. The Cold War is over.

It is over because the Soviet Union, which …