Bush Sees Delay in Soviet Summit : Diplomacy: Differences on arms reduction may push the meeting back. Fitzwater also tells concern over Chinese premier’s planned trip to the Middle East.

President Bush said Monday that he and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev have all but given up on meeting this month and that he probably will not go to Moscow before late July.

“START problems,” Bush said in a comment to The Times, referring to the strategic arms reduction talks under way between the two countries. “To have this meeting, we don’t have to have every ‘T’ . . . crossed and every ‘I’ dotted, but we’ve got to get a little closer than we are now.”

As recently as a week ago, the President and his aides were talking of imminent progress and a superpower meeting before the end of June to sign a nuclear arms reduction pact.

But since then, presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said, “I think both sides took a look at the issues involved, realized they were difficult and in great detail and that there was going to be some hard negotiating that had to take place.

“We’re talking here about a treaty that’s some 450 pages long. We’re talking about as many as 100 outstanding points still to be resolved,” Fitzwater added. “It’s going to take a little more time.”

Separately, Fitzwater expressed concern about a planned visit by Chinese Premier Li Peng to the Middle East next month.

American officials “all have a great deal of skepticism about the Chinese position on weapons proliferation because of their recent history,” Fitzwater said. Li’s visit “is a matter of concern, and it only serves to alert us to the fact that this is a very real problem.”

Fitzwater’s comments underlined the dilemma that Administration officials face concerning China. On the one hand, Bush’s aides--trying to rebut criticism that the President is too cozy with China’s leaders--have been looking for opportunities to criticize Chinese actions that run counter to U.S. interests. And Chinese arms sales to the Middle East have been a prominent sore spot in relations between the two nations.

On the other hand, the Administration has been trying to claim that China’s arms policies are improving in response to Bush’s policy of remaining “engaged” with Beijing. On Friday, for example, officials touted China’s willingness to attend a Middle East arms reduction conference in Paris next month as a success for Bush’s policies.

Li plans to visit Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and he may also stop in Jordan and Syria, officials here said. China has sold arms to most of those countries, including missiles that Administration officials view as a serious escalation of the regional arms race. In addition, U.S. officials have accused the Chinese of aiding nuclear weapons development programs in the region.

In meetings with the Chinese, U.S. officials “intend to raise in the most direct way possible the arms sales that they have made in the past and that they are contemplating,” Fitzwater said.

As the schedule is now shaping up, Bush is likely to spend nearly all of July working on high-profile policy issues involving the Chinese and the Soviets.

Congress is expected to vote in July on whether to go along with Bush’s plans to extend most-favored-nation trading status to China. The debate likely will be contentious, with critics accusing Bush of closing his eyes to widespread human rights abuses in China.

The Administration also will be debating arms control and economic ties with the Soviet Union. Gorbachev is expected to be in London in mid-July to talk to the heads of state of the world’s seven major industrialized democracies--the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada--and to make a pitch for aid to his ailing economy.

Earlier, many Administration officials had assumed that Bush would go to Moscow before the Group of Seven meeting in London and present some kind of economic aid package to Gorbachev along with an arms control agreement.

Now, however, “I think that’s getting very complicated because of the complexity of the remaining issues” on the arms control talks, Bush said.

For the last several months, Administration officials had put the nuclear talks on hold, waiting until they cleared up disagreements with Moscow over the meaning of a treaty signed last year to cut non-nuclear weapons in Europe. That dispute was cleared up recently, but officials then discovered that the nuclear talks had several difficult hurdles to cross.

“We’re in the end game,” Fitzwater said. “When you get into these things, there is always a lot of maneuvering and negotiating for leverage and time.

“The experience has always been that you go right up until the last minute and claim you can’t reach agreement and then suddenly it’s all there,” he added. “I am sure there is a little bit of that kind of a ploy going on, but both sides do that.”

Because of the holdups on the arms talks, the schedule for resolving economic aid issues has slowed. Last week, Administration officials hinted that Bush was on the verge of announcing a deal to provide credits to allow the Soviets to buy more U.S. grain. Now, the same officials suggest that the announcement is likely to be put off for a while.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III is likely to pursue both aid and arms control issues when he meets with Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh next week in Berlin.