POWER ON THE PACIFIC RIM : Insider : 5 Forces Shape Asia Policy : With U.S. goals in the region gone blurry, the Bush Administration and Congress are tugged back and forth by conflicting constituencies.

Want to figure out what American policy toward the Pacific Rim is these days? Good luck. You’re probably going to need a score card and a calculator.

Any effort to determine Washington’s approach to Asia must reckon with the complex and delicate interplay among various American constituencies. Each of those constituencies is important, but none is so powerful that it can override the others.

For more than four decades, figuring out America’s stance toward Asia was a much simpler task, a matter of black and white. Or, more accurately, red and white.

From the late 1940s until President Richard M. Nixon’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China, American policy in Asia was aimed at stopping the spread of communism. Later, from the early 1970s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, it focused more narrowly on countering Soviet military power.

Now, with the end of the Cold War, there is no longer any single, dominant force--such as anti-communism or fear of the Soviet Union--that can guide American policy in Asia. And without that dominant focus, the Bush Administration and Congress often seem lost and adrift in the Pacific as they are tugged back and forth by the various constituencies of U.S. Asia policy.

Five of those constituencies are particularly important to understanding the pressures at work on the Administration. Call them the Five Forces of Asia Policy.

The Moneymakers

These include major U.S. companies that export to Asia (grain and food companies, aircraft, aerospace and chemical firms) as well as other American firms that import or retail Asian products (Chinese textiles and shoes, Japanese or Korean videocassette recorders and cars). Lined up behind them are the American middlemen--lawyers, bankers, deal makers and consultants--who provide services for the Asia trade.

As representative spokesman for the moneymakers, we might choose Robert S. Strauss, the Washington lawyer and former Democratic Party chairman who brokered the deal in which Japan’s Matsushita bought out MCA and earned a hefty $8-million fee in the process.

The Victims

These are the sectors of the U.S. economy damaged by Asian competition, such as the American steel and auto industries, textile and shoe manufacturers.

The victims also include workers and labor union leaders, who seek to prevent the loss of American jobs to Japanese, Korean and other Asian manufacturers.

In the private sector, the self-appointed spokesman for the victims is Chrysler Corp. Chairman Lee A. Iacocca. And in Congress, the spokesmen include House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who recently thundered to a Bush Administration official that he was tired of “watching our industries being wiped out.”

Asian-Americans

Only in recent years have Asian-Americans become numerous enough and politically active enough to begin to influence American policy toward Asia. By the 1980s, with the ethnic Asian population growing both in numbers and affluence, several Asian constituencies began to swing their weight.

Over the past decade, Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.) chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, amassed a campaign war chest of $1.6 million in part through the novel technique of raising money from a nationwide list of 18,000 Asian-American contributors. Responding to his contributors’ concerns, Solarz used his subcommittee chairmanship to press for greater democracy in countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines; he became a staunch supporter and patron of Philippine President Corazon Aquino.

Since the 1989 upheavals in Beijing, Chinese-Americans--joined by the more than 40,000 Chinese students at American universities--have become a solid constituency pressing for human rights inside China.

More recently, Vietnamese-Americans have served notice that they may seek to block any efforts by the Bush Administration to normalize ties with the Communist regime in Hanoi. Indeed, some political analysts suggest that Vietnamese-Americans in California might some day influence U.S. Asia policy in much the same way that hard-line Cuban-Americans in Florida have for decades swayed U.S. policy in Latin America.

The Pentagon

For American military planners, one of the principal lessons of World War II was that the United States must continue its “forward deployment”--that is, the stationing of troops overseas.

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon strives most of all to maintain the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Yet, the defense agency’s influence over U.S. policy in the Pacific extends well beyond the three countries that host American troops.

Consider the tiny island group of Palau, a U.S. trust territory in Micronesia. For years, it was formally under the aegis of the U.S. Department of the Interior. But American policy toward Palau has been set largely by the Pentagon, which seeks to keep open the possibility of building future military facilities there.

Whatever changes may come over the next decade, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said in Tokyo last year, “We shall maintain the necessary combat capability to ensure stability in Asia.”

The Strategists

While Pentagon officials look at the map of Asia and worry about the logistics of America’s war-fighting ability, the strategists play a more abstract game of global chess.

The best-known of the strategists, of course, were Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, who normalized U.S. ties with Beijing and sought to “play the China card” for diplomatic leverage against the Soviet Union.

With the end of the Cold War, Nixon and Kissinger have come up with a different rationale for strategic ties with China, arguing that they are important in order to promote Beijing as a potential counterweight against the rising power of Japan. Others among the strategists strongly disagree, contending that Japan should not be seen as a threat to the United States and that, in any event, China is an unreliable and unpredictable partner for Americans in Asia.

The fashionable new post-Cold War phrase that virtually all the strategists have agreed upon is that the United States should play a “stabilizing role” in Asia.

“A real or perceived U.S. reluctance to play the role of regional balancer, honest broker and arbiter would be inherently destabilizing,” Assistant Secretary of State Richard H. Solomon commented last year. That is a nice way of saying that if Americans retreat from places like the Philippines, other powers like Japan or China might be tempted to move in.

How do struggles among those Five Forces play out on specific issues? Consider the question of whether to lift the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam.

The moneymakers see a potential new market of 60 million people and push hard to open the way for American trade. On the other side of the issue, Vietnamese-Americans hold out for preserving the embargo until there is a democratic government in Vietnam.

The Pentagon has no direct stake in the issue, but tends to support lifting the embargo both because of a desire to lay the Vietnam War to rest and because of the attraction of someday returning to the naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. However, some of the strategists worry that if the United States moves closer to Vietnam, this will offend China, which through the late 1970s and early 1980s cooperated strategically with America and which remains Vietnam’s archrival in Southeast Asia.

And the victims? On this issue, there wouldn’t seem to be any. But just wait.

A few weeks ago, when Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) showed up at a congressional hearing to question State Department officials about U.S. policy toward Indochina, everyone in the room expected him to unleash his usual fervent right-wing attack on Vietnam’s Communist government.

Instead, the audience erupted in laughter when Helms, who comes from a textile state, got down to the nitty-gritty. “You’re not going to give them (Vietnam) a textile quota, are you?” he asked.

Voices of U.S. Policy on Asia

Five constituencies are key to understanding the pressures at work on the Administration. Here are representatives of what might be called the Five Forces of Asia Policy:

* A MONEYMAKER: Robert S. Strauss, former Democratic Party chairman, brokered the deal in which Japan’s Matsushita bought out MCA. He earned a hefty $8-million fee.

* A VICTIM: Chrysler Corp. Chairman Lee A. Iacocca considers Asian competition damaging to U.S. industry.

* ASIAN-AMERICAN CONSTITUENCIES: Over the past decade, Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.) amassed a campaign war chest of $1.6 million in part by raising money from Asian-American contributors.

* THE PENTAGON: Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney has said: “We shall maintain the necessary combat capability to ensure stability in Asia.”

* A STRATEGIST: Assistant Secretary of State Richard H. Solomon espressed the new stand: “A real or perceived U.S. reluctance to play the role of regional balancer, honest broker and arbiter would be inherently destabilizing.”