NEWS ANALYSIS : World Crises Raise Questions About How Clinton Will Use Military Force : Policy: President-elect may command three expeditions early on. He favors force, but some worry that Christopher is too cautious.

Bill Clinton wanted his presidency to focus on domestic policy, but a week before his inauguration, he already has begun to shoulder the burden of the commander in chief: When and where should the United States, the world’s only superpower, use force to work its will?

With American troops deployed on the front lines of the “new world order” in Somalia and Iraq and with military action in Bosnia under debate, the use of force already is a central issue facing the President-elect and his newly named aides.

Clinton already has declared himself willing to use U.S. military power in all three cases, although he has left his precise intentions unclear. He applauded President Bush’s decision to send troops to deliver famine relief in Somalia and publicly warned Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that he supports Bush’s tough line enforcing U.N. resolutions in the Persian Gulf.

The President-elect has said that he is willing to put U.S. warplanes into the air over Bosnia to keep Serbian aircraft on the ground, and he has told his aides to launch what one called “an intensive review” of further military and diplomatic actions he can take in Yugoslavia.

“Military power still matters . . . ,” Clinton said during the presidential campaign last fall. “I will use that strength where necessary to defend our interests.”

Those pronouncements, however vague, revealed a significant shift in the nation’s long-running debate over when and where to put soldiers’ lives on the line. For more than two decades, since the trauma of the Vietnam War, most Democratic presidential candidates emphasized their desire to avoid the use of military force--not their willingness to use it.

Now the country has elected a Democrat who opposed the Vietnam War and reluctantly supported the Persian Gulf War--but who may command three military expeditions in his first few months in office.

Each one poses a series of fundamental questions: When should a President send American troops into danger overseas? To deliver humanitarian aid, even if U.S. interests are not directly affected? To try to stop a civil war, or only to deter it from spreading?

The details of Clinton’s views on these issues remain unclear, even to some who worked with him during the campaign. “It’s not quite a doctrine--more an attitude,” one adviser said.

As a result, those questions are certain to arise today in the Senate confirmation hearings of Warren Christopher, Clinton’s nominee for secretary of state. In the first internecine foreign policy debate of the new Administration, some hawkish Democrats already have charged privately that Christopher is too cautious about using force to back up U.S. diplomacy. In a private meeting with conservative Democrats last week, Christopher denied the charge, saying that he not only supports Clinton’s positions but helped formulate them.

“I hope you won’t hold me accountable for all the errors of past Administrations,” Christopher said mildly, according to one participant. Christopher served as deputy secretary of state in the Administration of President Jimmy Carter.

Democratic hawks say that they were more pleased by Clinton’s nominations of Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.) as secretary of defense and former State Department official Anthony Lake as White House national security adviser. Both have argued for a more assertive U.S. policy in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, including the possible use of force.

The gathering debate already has scrambled the political fault lines of the Vietnam era. Some Democratic liberals who opposed the Vietnam War are arguing for military intervention in the Balkans; some normally hawkish Republican conservatives have come out on the opposite side, warning against endangering American troops in pursuit of what they consider ill-defined liberal objectives.

“It isn’t hawks and doves anymore,” said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), a conservative Democrat. “It’s internationalists and isolationists.

“The question is, are you prepared to use force in behalf of principles, or just to protect the national interest?” Lieberman said. “Traditional liberals are more ready to use force for a principle, as in Bosnia. Traditional conservatives are ready to use force where there is a national interest, as in the Persian Gulf. And some of us are prepared to use force in both cases.”

In the Gulf, conservatives enthusiastically supported a military expedition to reverse Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and its oil fields; liberals were divided over the issue.

In Somalia, liberals and conservatives joined in supporting an unprecedented use of force for a purely humanitarian end, with no direct connection to U.S. strategic interests--in large part because the mission was believed to pose little danger to the troops.

But in Bosnia, liberals and conservatives are faced with the most difficult case: a war in Eastern Europe that could eventually affect U.S. strategic interests, that has produced terrible casualties among civilians but that offers no clear opportunity for an easy, low-cost, effective use of force.

During his campaign, Clinton repeatedly criticized Bush for failing to act in the Bosnian conflict--but his own prescriptions were careful and only slightly more hawkish. The Democrat called for the establishment of a “no-fly zone” over Bosnia, an idea that the Bush Administration later embraced, and for consideration of allowing arms shipments to the beleaguered Bosnian government.

Now, aides said, the President-elect is considering what further steps he might take if the current United Nations-sponsored peace talks fail to stop the fighting in what was once Yugoslavia. Samuel Berger, chosen by Clinton to be his deputy national security adviser, said in a television interview this week that Clinton wants Western powers to signal that “we’re prepared to take tougher action” if Serbian forces attack the ethnic-Albanian population of the province of Kosovo.

Other steps reportedly under consideration include stepped-up diplomatic and economic pressure on Serbia and what one adviser called “a graduated series of military steps” such as air strikes against Serbian military facilities. But Clinton advisers, noting the public opinion polls, say they do not believe that Clinton is considering any use of U.S. ground troops in the Balkans.

In any case, they said, Clinton is unlikely to try to codify his approach in an all-embracing set of principles--a “Clinton doctrine.”

“I don’t think anybody is trying to do that,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate-Democratic think tank that was consulted by the Clinton campaign. “The American people are pragmatic. They look at each set of circumstances as they arise. If you try to impose the straitjacket of doctrine, you’ll only come to grief.”

Instead, the issue will be debated on a case-by-case basis, as it has been for decades.

“We’re stuck with intervening in ambiguous situations,” said Morton Halperin, a former White House aide now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That makes it difficult to come up with substantive criteria that work.”