NEWS ANALYSIS : Asians Feeling Slighted by Delay of Bush’s Trip : Diplomacy: Leaders wonder if the U.S. domestic and budget problems are making America turn inward.

Is the United States losing interest in Asia or taking it for granted?

This was supposed to be the month that the Bush Administration finally turned its attention to the world’s largest, most populous continent, a region where many felt that America was ignoring its long-term importance amid its preoccupations with the Soviet Union and the Middle East.

Instead, President Bush’s abrupt postponement of a long-planned trip to the area has reinforced the sense of slight among Asian leaders.

“One wonders, does this mean that going to Japan and (South) Korea is damaging to the President in domestic American politics?” one stunned Asian diplomat in Washington asked this week. “They tell us he (Bush) will still come, maybe in December, maybe January. But why would things be any better then?”

On Saturday, Secretary of State James A. Baker III will leave on an Asian trip in which he will have to give new assurances that the United States will remain interested, involved and influential in Asia. U.S. trade across the Pacific amounts to more than $300 billion, roughly a third more than trade across the Atlantic.

Baker will travel to Japan, South Korea and China. The first two of these countries had been expecting that Baker’s visit would be merely a warm-up for a Bush visit at the end of November. Now, Bush’s decision to postpone his own Asia trip means it will be left to the secretary of state to answer a host of questions about the future U.S. role in the region.

Some of these questions have been nagging in Asia for some time. For example, how much is the United States going to scale back its military deployments in Asia and the Pacific? Does America’s push for a North American free-trade area mean that the world will soon divide into three separate trading blocs--Europe, Asia and the Americas?

Some are new questions raised by the postponement of the President’s trip: Is the United States now so preoccupied by domestic problems and budget constraints that it has no time, money or energy left for Asia? Will America eventually turn inward, give up its leadership role in the Pacific and, in effect, allow Japan to become the dominant power in the region?

On the eve of his trip, Baker published a signed article in Foreign Affairs magazine that lays out the main themes of future U.S. policy in Asia: support for democracy, encouragement of economic ties that avoid the emergence of trade blocs and development of some new defense arrangement for the region.

But Baker’s article, which Undersecretary of State Robert Zoellick and Assistant Secretary of State Richard H. Solomon reportedly helped draft, includes words that are already outdated and seem ironic.

“President Bush’s trip to East Asia and the Pacific highlights our hopes for the future of this promising region,” Baker wrote. “Sustaining American engagement in East Asia and the Pacific is vital to U.S. interests--not just in the region but to the international system we are trying to forge.”

Baker’s article may increase anxiety in Asia about continuing friction between the United States and China by openly branding the leadership in Beijing “an anachronistic regime.” Baker will be meeting with top Chinese officials at the end of next week.

“China is in a time of transition,” Baker said in the article. “An anachronistic regime has alienated us by lashing out, by seeking to repress an irrepressible spirit.”

In effect, the article serves notice that the United States will not refrain from pressing for democracy in China, despite the continuing warnings of the Chinese leadership that such efforts amount to an interference in the country’s internal affairs.

Baker warned, however, against “turning our backs on China,” and defended what he called the Administration’s “policy of engagement” toward China’s leadership.

Critics of the Administration’s China policy--in Congress and among human rights groups and Chinese dissident organizations--have charged that by continuing to do business with the Chinese leadership, the United States may help confer legitimacy on the regime and help it shore up its shaky standing inside China.

Baker is not the only top U.S. official who will be in Asia over the next few weeks. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills will be making their own trips across the Pacific.

The original idea was to show that, with the Gulf War over and the post-coup situation in the Soviet Union becoming more chronic than acute, Administration officials from the President on down were ready to spend time on some of the important long-range issues affecting the role of the United States in the Pacific.

The most pressing issue, for now, is what sort of trade or economic grouping should be formed for Asia--and whether it will include the United States, or become, in effect, an intra-Asian “yen bloc,” dominated by Japan.

Baker will tackle this delicate issue at an economic meeting of Asian leaders in Seoul early next week. In his article, he warned against what he called “regional economic fragmentation,” and suggested that an Asian trade bloc excluding the United States would “cut off the Asia-Pacific community from the rest of the globe.”

Another big question is whether the Pacific Rim countries should join together in some new, multilateral defense structure.

For the past two years, a number of U.S. allies, including Australia and Canada, have called for creation of some new security grouping for Asia, perhaps similar to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Japan, too, has indicated that it believes there is a need for a new forum to deal with defense and security in the Pacific.

U.S. officials have strongly opposed these ideas. Instead, they have argued that the United States, through its defense alliances with Japan and South Korea and its deployment of troops throughout the region, can help preserve stability in Asia.

But in his article, Baker hinted that the United States may now be more willing to reconsider. “Multilateral approaches to security are slowly emerging,” he said in the Foreign Affairs article. “ . . . We should be attentive to the possibilities for such multilateral action.”

One Administration official noted that resolving such issues does not necessarily require a presidential visit. “Baker going there will be helpful. And Cheney and Powell too,” the official said. But he admitted that he was frustrated by the abandonment of Bush’s trip, which would have taken him to Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore and Australia.

“There’s every good domestic reason for a presidential trip to Japan,” one Administration official said. “The Japan-bashing in this country is down to a manageable level right now. And we need the (Japanese) investment.”