TOWARD A NEW ASIAN ORDER : A WORLD REPORT SPECIAL SECTION : America From Abroad : Attitudes Toward U.S. a Jumble of Contradictions : Many Asians are fed up with American ‘arrogance’ in trade and values. But they also worry about losing their security blanket.

The old “ugly American,” that heavy-handed Cold Warrior who was scorned for meddling so perniciously in East Asian affairs a quarter-century ago, has been replaced in the 1990s by a new, but not necessarily more sympathetic, caricature: the negligent and arrogant Yank.

Although traditional “go home” strains of anti-Americanism still exist--from radical South Korean students to the political movement that ejected U.S. military bases from the Philippines--America in Asia today is more often faulted for not being on the scene in sufficient strength.

Governments and native businessmen in the booming economies of the region are asking why American companies are not coming there with more investment and trade, and many are lamenting their deepening dependence on Japanese capital and credit.

Local analysts are fretting about a possible softening of the American will to provide a security blanket in Asia, in the face of the superpower’s economic woes, defense budget cuts and the post-Cold War reassessment of U.S. strategic interests.

But at the same time, the thriving capitalist societies of East Asia are exuding a new brand of confidence, which perhaps suggests that America’s future role in the region will have to be less judgmental--and less influential--than in the past.

Environmentalists, human rights advocates and democracy pundits take note. Asia’s so-called tigers and little dragons are getting fed up with American arrogance--and the condescending proposition that all democracies and free-market economies should be cast in America’s own image.

“What Asians find especially irritating is the combination of American arrogance and irrelevance,” said Kent Calder, a professor of political science at Princeton University. “The Americans still bluster about, trying to give everybody their advice, but they’re not offering any more economic aid, nor are they keeping pace with the Japanese in investment.”

Despite the unflagging popularity of such cultural icons as Big Macs and MTV, America is losing its luster as a paragon of democracy and justice. Growing disillusionment wasn’t helped by the verdict in the Rodney G. King beating case and the murderous rioting that followed.

The upheaval in Los Angeles “exposes to the world the hypocrisy of democracy and the morbid state of (U.S.) society,” snarled a recent commentary in Beijing’s Legal Daily, a Communist Party organ.

“The United States praises itself as the ‘bodyguard of human rights,’ ” the Chinese newspaper said. “But the ruthless reality shows the striking and ridiculous contrast between the United States lavishing praise on itself and the true face of its human rights situation.”

A succession of high-ranking Japanese officials, including Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, have made controversial utterances recently that betray contempt for the American work ethic. But these remarks are only the latest in a long line of rueful observations by the Japanese on the moral and economic decline of America, which last year acquired the sobriquet kembei, or scorn for America.

Japanese nerves were especially jagged during the Persian Gulf War, when a reluctant public recoiled at American pressure on Japan to deploy personnel as well as cash as its contribution to the U.S.-led multinational forces. America was widely viewed as trigger-happy.

“You Americans are so arrogant, you act as though you have a special pipeline to God,” Yoshihiro Miwa, an analyst at Nomura Research Institute, told an American dinner guest during a discussion of Japan’s Gulf policy.

Miwa’s outburst may have been uncharacteristic for the normally reserved Japanese, but he is not alone in harboring feelings of resentment toward a country that his generation once idolized. The wide-eyed children of the Occupation, who begged GIs for chewing gum, have grown into cynical 50-year-olds.

Few Asians are as outspoken in lambasting the Americans as Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed, a charismatic nationalist who suggested to the U.N. General Assembly last year that the Bush Administration’s “new world order” smacks of “neo-imperialism.”

Mahathir is particularly touchy about criticism of Malaysia’s logging practices in Sarawak, where native tribesmen and foreign environmentalists are trying to curtail the harvest of endangered rain forests.

“In the future, we will come across superpowers which assume that they are the policemen of the world, and if they think someone is wrong they will take action,” Mahathir said, reacting to legislation in Congress aimed at restricting logging in Sarawak.

Mahathir incensed officials in Washington when he proposed creating a pan-Asian economic grouping that would exclude the arrogant Americans (as well as the highhanded Australians and the cheeky Canadians). Indeed, the plan ignored the fact that the United States remains Asia’s most lucrative export market. But it also paid tribute to Japan’s ascendant role as the region’s leading economic player, in terms of direct investment, foreign aid and offshore manufacturing.

“We’re ambivalent about Japan,” said Jusuf Wanandi, chairman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Jakarta, Indonesia. “On the one hand, we’re too dependent on the Japanese, but it’s a matter of necessity. We have no alternatives. We’d love to see more American investment, but where is it?”

The United States is not alone in catching flak as an arrogant but fading Western power in Asia. In March, the Indonesian government severed a longstanding economic aid program with the Netherlands, excoriating the former Dutch colonizers for their bombastic criticism on human rights. The Netherlands had temporarily frozen its nominal aid to Jakarta to protest the killing by the Indonesian army of scores of protesters in East Timor last November.

Asia’s budding disenchantment with America has its true ironies. Vietnam, deeply scarred by American military intervention and crimped economically by the U.S. trade embargo, has cast aside historic bitterness to woo Washington with free-market reforms. Incredibly, Vietnamese seem to genuinely like Americans.

It perhaps goes without saying that the attitudes toward America across the region are contradictory, sometimes paradoxical.

Last month in Manila, for example, on the 50th anniversary of the fall of Bataan and the start of the infamous Death March, Philippine President Corazon Aquino used the official commemoration to deliver a stinging rebuke to Washington for not paying Filipino war veterans the same benefits that American veterans receive.

Yet several hours later, a 74-year-old Filipino veteran stood at a memorial at the site of the former prisoner-of-war camp in Cabanatuan and led the assembled crowd in a tearful rendition of “God Bless America.”

Staff writer Schoenberger was formerly assigned to the Times Tokyo bureau.