TOWARD A NEW ASIAN ORDER : A WORLD REPORT SPECIAL SECTION : Insider : Washington Policy on Asia: Watch and Wait : * With the election nearing, the White House wants to avoid dust-ups over its approach to the Pacific Rim.

When the Bush Administration looks at Asia these days, it gets jittery.

The Administration realizes that Asia is extremely important--perhaps, in the long run, the most significant part of the world for the United States. Yet at the same time, Administration officials realize that Asia is for the moment a region with many political liabilities in this country. So from the Administration’s standpoint, the less said publicly about Asia these days, the better.

In this presidential election year, Administration policies toward the two major countries in East Asia, Japan and China, have already been attacked, both by Democratic candidates and by Republican challenger Patrick J. Buchanan.

With Japan, the criticism is that the Administration has failed to protect American interests on trade and other economic issues. On China, the rap is that President Bush and his aides have not taken strong enough action to counteract Beijing’s human rights abuses, its mercantilist trade policies and its exports of dangerous arms, missiles and nuclear technology.

“There is a tendency these days to deal with these issues in a very partisan way,” says one congressional staff member who specializes in Asian affairs. “For a long time, American policies toward both Japan and China were bipartisan. Now, both of them fall into the divided-government basket.”

The Administration also is treading warily in its policy toward Vietnam, trying to prevent it too from turning into a different sort of campaign issue.

Many Indochina specialists believe that if the White House was to move now toward lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam, as such American allies as Japan and France would like Washington to do, Bush might leave himself open to criticism from independent candidate Ross Perot. In the past, Perot has accused Washington officials of failing to do enough to track down American servicemen listed as missing in action during the Vietnam War.

For now, the Administration’s approach toward Asia seems to be to hold on, avoid controversy and do and say as little as possible until after November’s elections. Then, assuming Bush is reelected, there may be some new initiatives, such as a move toward normalizing U.S. relations with Vietnam.

The Administration also may be prepared, after the November elections, to redirect U.S. policy to focus on some of the long-range issues it must face in Asia--such as the reunification of Korea, the status of Taiwan and, trickiest of all, future relations between the United States and Japan.

Some critics say that top levels of the Administration still devote less attention to Japan than it deserves. “There have been few U.S. policy-makers who even took Japan seriously,” says Jonathan Pollack of RAND Corp. “(Former Secretary of State George P.) Shultz did, but not (Secretary of State James A.) Baker (III).”

Baker and his aides insist that such charges are unfair. But since taking office, Baker has been to Tokyo only three times--two of them in 1989. By comparison, he has been to Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, twice in the past year.

Over the past year, the Administration has managed one memorable disaster in Asia, one stalemate and, it appears, a quiet but important success.

The disaster was Bush’s early-January visit to Japan. The long-planned trip had been postponed last November for political reasons and then recast as an effort to obtain for America, in Bush’s words, “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

The idea was to shift some public attention away from the strategic and military components of the ties between the United States and Japan and toward the beneficial economic aspects of the relationship. But the trip was handled in a way that highlighted the economic frictions between the two countries and raised new questions about the extent to which the U.S.-Japanese alliance will begin to fray in the new, post-Cold War world.

On its China policy of maintaining a working dialogue with Beijing’s Communist leadership, the Administration last year avoided any comparable disasters.

Since last summer, Democrats on Capitol Hill, led by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), have forced a series of votes aimed at imposing conditions on renewal of China’s most-favored-nation trade benefits. The House has approved such legislation by overwhelming margins, and each time the Senate has come closer to the two-thirds margin that would be necessary to override a Bush veto.

Despite the repeated challenges in Congress, however, the Administration has managed to preserve China’s trade benefits. The Democrats seem, for now, to be tiring of the effort and thinking of new or different ways of challenging Bush’s China policy.

The White House has been having its own irritating problems with China.

The Administration spent most of the past year winning Beijing’s agreement in writing to abide by the international rules limiting the spread of missile technology--yet it remains unclear whether, in practice, China will curb its arms sales. During a trip to Beijing last November, Baker thought he had won agreement from Chinese leaders to let dissidents leave the country, only to find out, months later, that China’s pledges weren’t worth very much.

The most important success for the Administration’s Asia policy over the past year, it now appears, has been the determined U.S. campaign to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Any claim of American success has to be carefully qualified, because it is still uncertain whether North Korean President Kim Il Sung has any last-minute surprises in store. But North Korea seems to be willing, after years of delay, to allow officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency--and perhaps South Korean or American officials as well--to inspect its nuclear facilities.

To extract these concessions from Pyongyang, the Administration last fall showed some flexibility of its own.

The United States withdrew American nuclear warheads from South Korea and signaled its willingness to let North Korean officials inspect American facilities in South Korea. U.S. officials also worked closely with Japan, South Korea and even Russia and China in a concerted diplomatic effort to keep North Korea from turning into an Asian version of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Over the next few years, the biggest challenge for the United States will be to manage the changing U.S. relations with Japan. And it is unclear, for now, whether the Administration is working on long-range strategy.

“If Japan begins to feel insecure in the face, for example, of a nuclear-armed North Korea or saber-rattling China, or if Japan decides to rearm, sparking a reaction among its neighbors, U.S. interests could be jeopardized,” the conservative-oriented Heritage Foundation said this spring.