PERSPECTIVE ON THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY : Another Shot Heard Round the World : Whenever Washington makes a 180-degree change of course, governments everywhere gird for the ripple effect.

The United States does not run only its own historical clock by cycles. When the world’s most powerful nation tacks on a new course--as Arthur Schlesinger pere discovered 50-plus years ago, and as Schlesinger fils believes is currently the case--the rest of the globe follows, sometimes amplifying the original impulse.

In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ushered in a new Keynesian age at home, slightly preceding similiar turns of events in France, Spain, Chile, Britain and Mexico.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s election and “conservative revolution” inspired a worldwide rightward ideological drift, often magnified well beyond its original American dimensions. Indeed, one of the peculiarities of the United States’ ideological impact on much of the world lies in the exaggerated shape the mimicking of American trends actually takes.

In this sense, Bill Clinton’s election may have an impact elsewhere well beyond the precise policies and real changes he initiates. In actual policy terms, the changes wrought by Clinton in Washington may be less than momentous; the new President may end up such a prisoner of the markets, of the interests that paid for his election and of the constraints of reelection, that the transformations he promised will remain largely a dead letter. But the rest of the world will be looking at the big picture, and and from that perspective, the Clinton era has already begun and is even now making its effects felt where they count most: in the realm of ideas.

Clinton’s victory has legitimized some themes that seemed permanently discredited during the high point of the Reagan-Bush years: that social equality is worth striving for, and that public policy should correct an errant market.

During the conservative era, social equality not only went out of fashion; its opposite was flaunted as a matter of policy: Social disparities were unfortunate but necessary ingredients of a paradigm for growth, investment and prosperity. After a while, the disparities widened, prosperity remained limited to a few and growth went flat, but the paradigm stood firm. It has now crumbled; a main ideological thrust of the new team in Washington is that social inequality is a wrong that should be righted, or at least the attempt should be made.

The effects of this turnaround in Washington will be keenly felt abroad where social disparities are worst--in Latin America--or where they have been most strongly hailed as harbingers of a new era--in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The second theme that Clinton struck to win votes will reverberate around the world even if he does not really do anything with it at home. Because Ronald Reagan believed blindly in the market--perhaps his only belief besides virulent anti-communism--and because that seemed to be the secret of the United States’ success in the ‘80s, most other nations, even those that should have known better, embraced the cathechism blindly. The results in the economy and the subsequent backlash from a disillusioned public were not long in coming in the United States. Soon, an American President will be inaugurated who believes that the market should be helped, cajoled and sometimes even bullied into doing things it cannot accomplish alone.

Again, the impact abroad cannot be overstated: The market interventionists in Latin American capitals, the go-slow advocates in Eastern Europe, the defenders of the lingering social democratic status quo in Western Europe, will no longer have to take on their own policy adversaries plus the President of the United States, but will be able to invoke the President, at least ideologically.

Another area where the distance between rhetoric and action in Washington will be felt keenly abroad is taxation. Many governments, particularly in Latin America, have been practicing their own versions of supply-side, trickle-down economics: lowering tax rates on the wealthy and improving collection in order to raise revenues. Higher taxes were seen as wrong and counterproductive, scaring away the people with the money to invest. Worse, they were seen as bucking world trends: Wasn’t the United States lowering taxes on its upper class?

Whatever else may happen under a Clinton Administration, it seems safe to expect higher taxes on the rich. And this makes a lot of affluent Latin Americans very nervous, either because they have their money in Miami and Clinton has proposed taxing foreigners’ U.S. profits, or because the government that pursued tax reform in their home country by lowering taxes may now decide to both raise and collect them, bringing together the worst of both possible worlds.

A distinction should thus be made between the impact of what Clinton will actually do, and what the rest of the world thinks he would like to do. Ideas count, and modern communications zip them around much more easily than facts or figures. In the United States, Clinton will ultimately be judged by his acts; abroad he may well be gauged by his thoughts. A strange situation for a President of the United States--the anti-intellectual nation par excellence--but perhaps a sign of the times, and of a certain maturity.