NEWS ANALYSIS : Aspin’s Foreign Policy Role Is Eclipsed by Christopher : Cabinet: Secretary of state’s prominence surprises those who expected defense chief to be the brighter star.

After two months in office, the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy team has produced an unexpected hierarchy of power: Secretary of State Warren Christopher is up, Defense Secretary Les Aspin is down--and everyone else is nearly invisible.

It wasn’t supposed to work that way, according to conventional wisdom. By most expectations, Aspin was supposed to be one of the bright stars of the Clinton Cabinet, a brilliant idea man backed by whiz-kid aides. Christopher, by contrast, was portrayed--even by some of his admirers--as a stolid, quiet negotiator, unlikely to be a major figure on the world’s stage.

But instead of taking Washington by storm, Aspin and his aides have been bogged down in unwanted problems and bruised by minor mishaps, from the tangled issue of gays in the military to confusion over the U.S. airdrop of aid into Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Christopher, meanwhile, has quickly become the Administration’s visible--and voluble--point man on major issues from Russia to Bosnia and the Middle East. And President Clinton, concentrating on domestic affairs, has remained largely in the background.

Senior officials said that outcome is a deliberate division of labor on Clinton’s part. The new President actually spends more time on foreign policy than it appears, they insisted, but he does not want the American public to think he is being distracted from his focus on the economy. That is one reason Clinton chose Canada as the site of his first summit meeting with Russia President Boris N. Yeltsin April 3-4; Vancouver is only 25 miles from the Washington state line.

Last week, Clinton conducted a series of meetings with visiting foreign leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But aides said that was merely an accident of scheduling, not a deliberate shift in focus.

“I have had to take a good deal of time off to deal with the foreign policy responsibilities of the President,” Clinton said almost apologetically on Friday--perhaps the first time a chief executive has ever described dealing with international affairs as “time off.”

“We haven’t forgotten that this President was elected primarily to get our domestic house in order,” a senior foreign policy aide said.

Officials said Clinton keeps abreast of the details of most major foreign issues but that he has actively involved himself in working out policy only on Russia--because he fears that a return to authoritarian rule in Moscow would doom his domestic program.

On other areas, from Bosnia to the Middle East, Christopher and Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser, have teamed up to take the leading role. Vice President Al Gore, Gore aide Leon Fuerth and Christopher aide Peter Tarnoff also have been major players, officials said.

Noticeably absent from that most-powerful list is Aspin, the 54-year-old former congressman who for eight years was the influential chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. While Christopher, using his close campaign ties with Clinton, has pushed his candidates for lower-level State Department jobs through a balky White House appointments process, Aspin has been left home alone at the Pentagon, with few political appointees in place to share the burden of his job.

Plain bad luck handed Aspin a series of thorny, no-win issues, from Clinton’s controversial promise to end the military’s ban on overt homosexuality to his budget-driven list of military bases marked for closure.

To make matters worse, a heart problem sent Aspin to the hospital twice in three weeks, raising questions about his long-term health. With a pacemaker implanted in his chest last week, he left the hospital on Saturday and is expected to return to work at the Pentagon on Monday.

Perhaps most important, Aspin quickly collected two shiny black eyes over the highest-visibility crisis on his agenda: the question of U.S. military intervention in Bosnia. Last month, as the National Security Council worked on policy proposals for Clinton, Aspin adopted the cautious counsel of Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who argued against a U.S. airdrop of humanitarian aid. But Christopher and Lake, supported by Gore, reportedly pushed for the airdrop--and won.

Then, after only three days of aid deliveries, Aspin announced that the airdrops had achieved their “symbolic” goal and that the Administration was about to suspend them.

The statement baffled and annoyed Clinton and Christopher, who scrambled to correct it. Clinton told reporters that the airdrops would continue, making no effort to spare Aspin any embarrassment. Officials said Aspin apparently simply spoke without thinking--an assessment that did little to boost his stature in Clinton’s eyes.

A similar problem occurred last week when Aspin announced that, before sending any U.S. troops to Bosnia, he would insist on several strict conditions, including a genuine cease-fire and a withdrawal of Serbian troops from some areas. That was an accurate description of Defense Department policy but it nettled Christopher, who did not want to open up a public debate over the sensitive issue of troop deployment while difficult negotiations with the Bosnian factions were still under way. Aspin’s statement “isn’t an Administration position,” a State Department official said pointedly.

The problem, both friends and foes of Aspin agree, is that after 22 years in Congress, the new defense chief has not quite made the transition from legislator to Cabinet officer. Aspin’s hospitalization would have drawn little notice when he was in Congress, for example, but now that he is second only to the President in the nation’s chain of military command, his health is a major public concern. But his staff initially refused to release much information about his medical condition.

The same principle applies to Aspin’s imprecision on Bosnia. The public is used to House and Senate members saying almost anything that comes to mind. Since there are 535 of them, it hardly matters what one of them thinks. But a defense secretary--or secretary of state--must be more precise. Aides said that an additional measure of control will come in time--particularly after this past month’s painful lessons.

Even critics agreed that not all of Aspin’s setbacks have been his fault. The hospital stays, which interrupted his early momentum, were the result of a heart problem exacerbated by a toxic reaction to inoculations he was given.

Delays in the appointments of aides are attributable to the White House. Aspin has known whom he wanted from the start, but the Clinton team has been slow in screening the nominations and has been haggling with him over the question of “diversity.”

And the flap over the gays-in-the-military issue was unleashed prematurely--even before Aspin took office--by key White House staff members, who apparently were convinced that the President could resolve it simply by issuing an executive order lifting the current ban.

Nevertheless, his slow start has left Aspin far behind in his own schedule for overhauling the Pentagon for the post-Cold War world. His push to revise the fiscal 1994 Pentagon budget had to be delayed as a result of the turmoil. The secretary is having to give short shrift to recommendations by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for eliminating duplication among the military services.

And his planned reorganization of the Pentagon--reshaping its internal structure to enable the department to deal more effectively with post-Cold War problems such as United Nations peacekeeping operations and management of the defense industrial base--is still only a shell. As of last week, only one of his sub-Cabinet choices was in place.

Aspin has begun slowly to rebuild his image, both in and outside the department. In part of an emerging campaign to bolster his standing with the military, he flew to Ft. Drum, N. Y., to welcome members of the Army’s 10th Light Infantry Division who were returning from duty in Somalia. He later accompanied Clinton--who also was on a fence-mending mission--to visit the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. And he held court on his old stomping-grounds on Capitol Hill to offer a sympathetic ear to lawmakers upset over prospects that their states would be targeted in this year’s round of military base-closings.

But he still has a long row to hoe before he outpaces Christopher. The methodical lawyer from Los Angeles, who won Clinton’s confidence when he managed the selection of Gore as vice president last summer, moved quickly to get his key aides into place at the State Department.

After three weeks in office, he announced the Administration’s initiative on Bosnia, quelling complaints that Clinton had failed to move on that issue. After little more than a month, he was able to announce the reconvening of Middle East peace talks and a date for the meeting with Yeltsin.

Christopher’s job has been easier than Aspin’s in some respects. He has been the designated spokesman, often announcing the products of others’ work. Much of the behind-the-scenes work on Bosnia, for example, was done by Lake and Fuerth. But the new secretary of state has also turned out to be unexpectedly attentive to his own public image.

He often speaks to reporters two or three times a day, taking advantage of routine “photo opportunities” with foreign visitors to answer press questions. He sets aside time every day to read newspaper accounts of his own performance. So far, aides said, he has had reason to enjoy the reading.

How much time Aspin will have to turn the Pentagon into a mini-State Department, even if he wants to, remains to be seen. It’s true that the reorganization he has launched will give him the means. Under his proposal, the old office of the deputy secretary for policy, which has functioned as a relatively modest think tank during previous administrations, will be revamped to place new emphasis on foreign policy-related issues. The list includes regional security, nuclear proliferation, economic and environmental issues, strategy and resources, and--a first for the Pentagon--democracy and human rights.

Aspin has assembled a high-level team of foreign policy heavy-hitters--including Frank G. Wisner, a former George Bush Administration undersecretary of state for national security issues--as undersecretary for defense policy.

But the defense secretary is likely to be limited by realities. To begin with, whatever forays Aspin wants to make in the policy arena, the State Department still has the reins institutionally to make and carry out foreign policy. By law, it is state--not defense--that conducts negotiations with foreign governments, shepherds meetings between Clinton and foreign leaders and represents the United States at the United Nations.

Because of his work during the campaign and the transition, Christopher already is in the solid good graces of the President and his staff. Both factors would be difficult for the defense secretary to overcome.

What is more, Aspin will have to cope with a full plate of defense issues. The secretary already has scheduled a major review of defense policy early this spring, with a view toward overhauling the military for the post-Cold War world. By some accounts, it could be the most sweeping such restructuring in recent memory.

In mid-summer, Aspin must meet a presidential deadline to propose a way to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military--an issue that, as he has learned the hard way, will require political sensitivity and deft management. He also will have to help Clinton step through the minefield of base-closing recommendations by the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, the nine-member independent panel that is scheduled to produce its shutdown list for submission to Clinton by July 1. And he must shape a major new program to help the defense industry adjust to the shrinking of the defense Establishment.

To top that off, there will be the usual round of hearings--and negotiations--with Congress, which this year seems more eager than usual to tap the defense budget to help finance new spending elsewhere and reduce the federal budget deficit.

With the Administration still in flux and its four-year term only just begun, Aspin has plenty of time to make up lost ground--and Christopher will have plenty of opportunities to slip.