Some of Asia’s Leaders Uneasy as Baker Talks of U.S. Policy Changes : Diplomacy: The secretary is visiting the Far East. Its leaders are wondering what he has in mind when he cites ‘new circumstances.’

Soon after Secretary of State James A. Baker III landed Sunday in this pristine city-state, he was greeted by an old-fashioned military show: a parade of Singaporean troops and missiles and a flyover of roaring Skyhawk fighter jets.

They served as a reminder of past decades of American policy in Asia, when the United States viewed places like Singapore as “dominoes” and tried to help them arm and defend themselves against an expansionist, Soviet-backed Communist regime in Vietnam.

Now, U.S. policy toward Asia is changing. The transformation was dramatically symbolized by the July 18 announcement that the United States will open new talks with Vietnam over Cambodia’s future.

And Baker--who was preoccupied by European problems during his first 18 months in office and spent relatively little time on Asia--is devoting much of his current trip across the Pacific to proclaiming and sketching out the changes in U.S. policy he envisions.

The secretary has spoken repeatedly in recent days of what he calls the “post-postwar order in Asia.” And, seemingly borrowing the idiom and language of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Baker talks of “new circumstances” in Asia and of the necessity and inevitability of change.

Such talk of a changing order makes some Asian leaders uneasy, particularly in places like Singapore, whose plush hotels and teeming shopping malls bear witness to some of the benefits of the existing order.

What is Baker’s message? What are the changes in U.S. policy in Asia that Baker is sketching out on this trip?

In Baker’s view, the Soviet Union is now seen as a potential friend and partner, rather than the top American adversary in Asia. Baker’s planned meetings later this week with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze in the Siberian city of Irkutsk represent a major symbolic change, a session in which top U.S. and Soviet officials sit down in Soviet Asia to try to settle Asian problems such as the continuing conflict in Afghanistan.

Similarly, in Baker’s new Asian order, Vietnam is portrayed as less threatening than it has been in the past. The secretary of state regularly reminds Southeast Asian leaders that Vietnam last year withdrew its troops from Cambodia and that Hanoi may now be ready for “a process of political reconciliation.”

By contrast, in Baker’s emerging Asia policy, China, America’s close partner in the anti-Soviet policies of the late 1970s and early 1980s, is to be largely ignored--at least for the time being while Beijing is enmeshed in internal power struggles and a seeming paralysis of policy.

The secretary of state is pointedly bypassing Beijing on this trip, while he finds time to stop just across China’s borders in Soviet Asia and to praise new democratic elections in Mongolia, the world’s second-oldest Communist state. Baker’s itinerary, which calls for him to fly over China but not to land there, amounts to a blunt political signal that will not be missed by Chinese leaders.

Finally, Baker makes clear at every opportunity that the United States will be acting in partnership with Japan. Over the past couple of years, Baker told one session of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations in Jakarta, Indonesia, last week, the United States and Japan have increased their already close political and military ties.

This emerging Asia policy is only now being sketched out by a secretary of state who has previously had little interest in or impact on this part of the world.

Soon after taking office in 1989, Baker worked hard to hammer out an agreement with Congress on Central America. Since then, he has focused his efforts on changes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Germany.

The secretary has visited Asia three times in the last 18 months, far less often than he has traveled to Europe. And on his earlier Asian journeys, he generally carried forward past U.S. policies instead of adding his own imprint, as he is doing this time.

Baker all but conceded his past inattention to Asia in a message to participants at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum Monday.

“I know many of you are concerned about the amount of attention that Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have received in the last year,” he said. “It’s true that our diplomatic focus has been heavily concentrated on that region, but the pace and scope of events have demanded that.”

The timing of Baker’s current move to reshape U.S. Asia policy was dictated by a series of events, both abroad and on Capitol Hill.

Overseas, Baker’s meetings with Shevardnadze several times this year apparently have convinced him of Soviet willingness to ease tensions in Asia. In recent months the Soviet Union has sharply reduced its aid to Vietnam, thus increasing the chance that Hanoi might accept a deal that could bring it economic benefits from the West.

In Washington, meanwhile, the Bush Administration has been running into ever-stronger opposition to its Asia policies.

For more than a year, both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans have been strongly criticizing President Bush’s efforts at reconciliation with the Chinese leadership.

More recently a growing number of lawmakers, led by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), have complained that unyielding U.S. hostility to Vietnam and the Vietnam-backed government in Cambodia could result in a return to power of the Khmer Rouge, the faction--supported by China--under whose rule more than 1 million Cambodians died.

According to Administration sources, National Security Adviser Brent A. Scowcroft resisted the recent shift in Asia policy, but Baker won Bush’s approval for the change. The episode was similar to one a year ago, when Baker grabbed the leading role in U.S. policy toward Gorbachev away from skeptics on the National Security Council.

The recent shift in U.S. policy toward Indochina and Baker’s remarks on a new “post-postwar order” in Asia are unsettling to some Asian leaders.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Abu Hassan last week voiced the fear that the partnership between the United States and Japan will not work and that the two powerful nations once again could come into conflict in Southeast Asia, as they did during World War II. Baker insists that these worries are unjustified.

Meanwhile, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s crusty prime minister, and his aides have complained that Baker’s emerging policy seems to leave China out in the cold--and thus will make it harder to obtain an end to Cambodia’s civil war. China will simply keep on arming, supplying and supporting its client in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, Lee argued.

“Who is going to send a peacekeeping force to Cambodia?” Lee asked rhetorically in an interview with the British Broadcasting Service. “British? American? Red Berets? Green Berets? Singapore armed forces?”

Baker repeatedly has told Asian officials he hopes for a peace settlement in Cambodia.

Overall, the message Baker is spreading this week is that American policy toward Asia is changing. But he also makes clear that as the Cold War ends, the United States is merely exerting its influence in different ways and is not moving toward isolationism.

“We are in a unique position, I think, as we move to a post-postwar world,” Baker declared last week, “because the United States is the one truly global power.”