BUSH’S FOREIGN POLICY : When an asset becomes a liability

President George Bush’s embarrassing trip to the Far East has raised a possibility unimaginable nine months ago in the victorious flush of the Gulf War--that U.S. foreign policy is starting to become a shambles like U.S. economic policy--and could cost Bush and the GOP a critical 1992 political credential.

It’s hard to overstate the importance. The ability to use foreign-policy success to offset weak domestic policy or unpopular economics has been an ace in the hole for the Reagan and Bush Administrations. The White House can’t afford to lose this advantage now.

Japanese commentators are unfair to dwell on Bush’s stomach flu and how he threw up on the trousers of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, calling it an allegory for a larger U.S. weakness and ineptitude. The problem, however, is that there is weakness and ineptitude.

If the President came home from Japan with what are essentially cosmetic trade concessions, he also had problems in his Australian visit. In addition, the international trade negotiations seem to be coming unglued; the Philippines have just told the United States to vacate the huge Subic Bay naval base; Eastern Europe is falling apart, and the Soviet Union--for two generations a great GOP election-year bogyman--is now disintegrating in a way that discredits White House strategy and may let the Democrats ask: “Who lost Mikhail Gorbachev?”

The underlying sourness, meanwhile, is that, by a large majority, Americans think Bush spends too much time on foreign affairs. They want more emphasis on the U.S. economy. Unnecessary junkets overseas will be politically counterproductive. The recent trip to the Far East seems to fit this category--especially after Japan’s refusal to make the sort of trade commitments the White House hinted in its press leaks, but also in light of the surprising anti-Bush riots that occurred when he visited Melbourne, Australia.

Voters now want the President’s focus on foreign policy to shift to concern about American jobs and American industries. Bush prefers diplomatic visits and summitry; he does the commercial side poorly. This was evident in the piddling number of U.S. autos Japan agreed to take, and it raises hazards for the President in the international trade negotiations and the discussions with Mexico over a North American Free-Trade Agreement.

However, Bush is even in trouble on his preferred diplomatic battlefields. The new world order he likes to invoke is a pipe dream mocked by fratricide and fundamentalism in the Middle East and ethnic and economic tensions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. President Woodrow Wilson pursued similarly naive objectives at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference after World War I. Wilson saw his home-front credibility wiped out by a wave of U.S. isolationist reaction against further American involvement in Europe’s cynical politics.

Today, as well, American voters are turning inward. In economically stricken New Hampshire, Patrick J. Buchanan, Bush’s rival for the GOP presidential nomination, is calling on Bush to pursue policies that emphasize “America First” rather than “America Last.” In one clever gimmick, Buchanan has placed an illuminated map of New Hampshire on a building wall in Manchester, the state’s largest city, while a spotlight nearby simultaneously searches skyward for the traveling President, to recall him to his duties at home.

Even Iraq has its embarrassing aspects, with Saddam Hussein still in power and, as columnist George Will pointed out, just as good a bet to keep his job as Bush. Right after the war, polls showed Americans regarded the war as a U.S. victory, but within weeks--as Hussein repressed the Kurdish people without interference--polls showed the U.S. electorate souring, annoyed at Bush’s inaction. A large plurality called the Gulf War win only a partial victory as long as the hated Iraqi leader sat in his Baghdad palace.

More recently, mid-December NBC News polls found 63% of Americans agreeing that “America is in a state of decline”--rejecting the President’s rosy insistence that the Gulf War represented an American national zenith. In a sense, the Gulf War can be viewed as the consummation of a succession of U.S. punitive expeditions against Third World dictators--the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing of Tripoli in 1986, the invasion of Panama in 1989--and, as such, provides a better confirmation of U.S. decline than of U.S. re-emergence as the ultimate superpower.

The sad historical parallel, unfortunately, is the punitive expeditions that Imperial Rome periodically mounted against the barbarians in its early days of decline. The successes didn’t prove that Rome had regained its former strength, but the triumphal returns of victorious Roman generals--like that of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf--gave the masses something to cheer about and took their minds off other problems.

In short, the multiple circumstances the United States faces around the world today increasingly represent problems and embarrassments--not great triumphs and proud achievements. They’re unlikely to provide the Bush Administration with more opportunities to win popularity through foreign policy in the style of Bush-Gorbachev summitry, the invasion of Panama and capture of Manuel A. Noriega, the collapse of communism and the Gulf War.

As problems supplant triumphs, foreign-policy situations will be more likely to trip the President up. And the more that international relations involve messy, winless situations, the more Americans will be eager to de-emphasize foreign affairs in favor of solving domestic problems.

In theory, this should be a notable opportunity for the Democrats to indict a growing list of GOP foreign-policy failures. But in reality, the opportunity is far more limited: elimination of much of the old GOP edge as the best party to keep America strong, deal with the Soviets and protect U.S. national-security interests, but little chance to create a Democratic advantage. After the last 25 years, the Democrats simply do not come to the U.S. foreign-policy table with credibility for international strategy and willingness to use force--not after the weakness displayed in situations from Vietnam and the Panama Canal to Central America and the Persian Gulf. Who can forget, also by way of allegory, that the last Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, once described himself as having been attacked by a killer rabbit?

Indeed, the Democrats’ weakness helps explain how the United States continued a pattern of global retreat under the Reagan and Bush Administrations without this erosion becoming a major national issue. The Democrats simply lacked the credibility--and, in many cases, the desire--to make it an issue. That will limits the benefit they can expect now.

Nonetheless, to the extent the Republicans lose their old image of international prowess, they will lose a vital presidential election-year asset going back to the Eisenhower era. This raises an important caution. Foreign policy is becoming a political platform on which the President can seem weak as well as strong--an ineffective onlooker, a second-rate trade negotiator or a bumbling automobile salesman, not just a victorious war leader. This is a crucial transition. If the foreign-policy debate becomes an international extension of Bush’s domestic economic ineffectiveness, he’s got a real problem.