COLUMN RIGHT / ALAN J. STOGA : Keep the Axis of U.S. Policy Tilted South : Clinton must build on Bush’s groundwork for partnership with Latin America.

Perhaps the most significant, if least appreciated, legacy of the Bush presidency will be the new relationship that has begun to emerge between the United States and the rest of the Americas. That relationship was outlined in the President’s Enterprise of the Americas speech more than two years ago and defined most concretely in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But the real promise and most interesting possibilities lie in the future, to be developed--or squandered--by the Clinton presidency.

The President-elect has yet to show much understanding of the enormous opportunity that lies in a new relationship with Latin America. Not since the days of President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress has the nation’s leadership attempted to engage Latin America in a strategy based on shared democratic values and mutual economic benefit. And Kennedy’s attempt, like so many other well-intentioned efforts of that era, suffered two fatal flaws: It was born out of fear of communism (the Cuban variety) and was forced to compete for resources and attention with the Vietnam War.

The Enterprise for the Americas is different. It is rooted in the reality that in the post-Cold War world, the United States needs new alliances, new institutions and, most of all, new strategies to resuscitate its economy and raise its standard of living. It reflects the profound changes that have swept through the hemisphere, producing market-oriented democracies in the most unlikely places. And it recognizes that the organizing principle in international affairs is no longer opposition to communism but economic competition.

In this new world, it is essential for the United States to rebuild its own competitiveness and to define anew the economic and political components of its key international relationships. This effort must start at home with a profound renewal of the country’s productive base, financial system and economic infrastructure. But it must also have a foreign dimension.

Gov. Clinton should--and almost certainly will--endorse NAFTA more or less as negotiated, because it is in the national interest. Indeed, the country (and his presidency) will be well served if Clinton builds on his predecessor’s initiative and pursues a hemisphere-wide trade and investment strategy as central to the United States’ new foreign policy.

From an economic perspective, such an approach offers the opportunity to help rebuild the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing by lowering costs and replacing aging plants and equipment with new, expanded operations abroad--as the Japanese did in Southeast Asia in the 1980s. Exports to Mexico, which has engineered the most substantial and sustainable recovery from Latin America’s decade-long debt crisis, have already created substantial numbers of U.S. jobs. The job-creating machine can be expanded and made permanent as the United States’ economic zone is pushed southward and as the rest of the hemisphere catches up with Mexico.

From a political perspective, a strategy focused on the Americas is the only way to cope with such cross-border problems as migration, drug smuggling and pollution.

But this new approach to Latin America, predicated on the region’s embrace of market economics and democratic values, also offers a platform for redefining our badly frayed relations with the industrial world. The constant commercial friction with Europe and Japan, the failure to complete the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, and persistent currency instability are all symptoms of an international financial system threatened with collapse, at least in part because the glue of a common security threat is gone. A new balance in what the United States gives and receives from the rest of the industrial world must quickly be found.

Obviously, Latin America is not an alternative to Europe and Asia--the United States has too much economic, cultural and social capital invested in those regions, and Latin America is still too poor--but it does not have to be. The Clinton Administration should pursue an aggressive strategy of domestic revitalization coupled with an emphasis on U.S.-Latin relations as the principal axis of its approach to foreign economic policy. If it does so, the potential loss of U.S. markets is likely to scare the Europeans and Asians into rethinking their relations with the United States.

And if such a process led to a new international financial and commercial structure, as the Bretton Woods Conference did 45 years ago, the groundwork for a return to sustained growth in the global economy would once again be in place.