NEWS ANALYSIS : U.S. Signals Harsher Stand on Japan Trade Imbalance : Diplomacy: Critics worry that in moving focus from security to economy, Clinton may be seeking a scapegoat.

In its first months in office, the Clinton Administration has served notice that it is prepared to carry out the most significant change in U.S.-Japan relations since the end of the American occupation four decades ago.

From President Clinton on down, senior U.S. officials have demonstrated a willingness, even an eagerness, to give a much higher priority to economic issues that divide the two countries than to security concerns that long joined the United States and Japan in an alliance against the former Soviet Union.

When Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa comes to the White House this week, he will find a new Administration whose initial tone, policies and outlook toward Japan seem to be markedly different from that of previous administrations.

The relationship between the United States and Japan “was a Cold War relationship, and the Cold War is over,” one member of the new Administration team said bluntly.

The summit will be the first between the world’s two economic superpowers since former President George Bush’s calamitous visit to Tokyo in January, 1992--a trip in which Bush, accompanied by a delegation of U.S. business leaders, became ill and collapsed in the middle of a state dinner.

Over the last few weeks, both at a televised press conference and in private remarks to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, Clinton has appeared to single out Japan for special criticism, sounding the theme that Japan’s promises for change in its ties with the United States may be insincere.

“If you look at the history of American trade relationships, the one that never seems to change very much is the one with Japan,” Clinton declared last month.

Over a quiet dinner in Vancouver a week ago, the President offered Yeltsin even sharper views: “When Japan tells us yes, often it means no.”

White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos later explained that Clinton was merely making a “casual comment about Japanese courtesy and etiquette.”

Whatever the intent, Clinton’s language is prompting critics to contend that the new President, in his early days on the job, may be using Japan as a scapegoat.

“From the political perspective, there’s a temptation to make Japan the foreign policy equivalent of Clinton’s attack on the pharmaceutical industry,” said Douglas Paal of the Asia Pacific Policy Center and former head of Asia policy for the Bush Administration’s National Security Council. “The idea is to rally public support behind a perceived aggressor.”

An Asian diplomat in Washington, who is not Japanese, said of Clinton’s remarks: “It doesn’t add up to an atmosphere of trust, that’s for sure. I think, because of his (Clinton’s) domestic background, he understands economic issues much more than strategic issues.”

During last year’s campaign for the White House, Clinton tended to avoid criticism of Japan without entirely rejecting it. When independent candidate Ross Perot denounced lobbyists for Japan, Clinton responded with proposals for changing the rules about lobbyists. If Perot took aim at the U.S. trade deficit with Japan, Clinton would talk in general about the deficit.

His comments about Japan since taking office have had a sharper edge. But as the President almost certainly knows, his remarks are in line with both opinion polls and the attitudes of U.S. business leaders.

William Watts, president of the private research group Potomac Associates, recently studied a number of opinion surveys in the United States and Japan. He found that in this country, there has been a startling drop in the number of people who regard Japan as trustworthy and a similarly striking increase in the percentage of Americans who view Japan as a threat to the United States.

“A more aggressive Clinton Administration approach to trade issues and negotiations could find widespread public support,” Watts concluded. “The public mood in both countries appears increasingly testy. . . . It gives the forthcoming Miyazawa-Clinton face-to-face a significance unmatched in recent Tokyo-Washington summits.”

Clinton’s assertion that the U.S. trade imbalance with Japan is qualitatively different and more intractable than that with other countries also accurately reflects what a group of senior U.S. business leaders told his Administration two months ago.

“Although the U.S. deficit with Japan has shrunk by 16% from 1988 to 1991, the reduction was much smaller than the improvement seen with other major trading partners,” concluded the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, whose membership includes the top executives of many of America’s biggest companies.

From the outset, top Administration officials have made it plain that their Japan policy will be governed more by economic concerns than by military and security issues. That in itself represents an important shift from the Bush Administration, which tried to resolve economic disputes with Japan to preserve its top priority, the security ties between Washington and Tokyo.

Before becoming secretary of state, Warren Christopher said at his confirmation hearing: “Japan has recently taken important steps to meet more of its international security responsibilities. . . . Now it must do more to meet its economic responsibilities as well.”

U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor seemed even more direct at his own confirmation hearings, declaring: “The days when we could afford to subordinate our economic interests to foreign policy and defense concerns are long past.”

The Administration’s seeming de-emphasis on the value of close, continuing security ties between the United States and Japan worries some veterans of previous administrations. They fret that, in its determination to stress economic issues, the new Administration may be headed for a foreign policy disaster that could, in a worst-case scenario, lead to a Japanese effort to develop and accelerate its own military power.

“There are huge costs in looking at our position in Asia strictly in economic terms,” said the RAND Corp.’s Richard H. Solomon, Bush’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific. “You can start with North Korea. . . .

“Here we are under (budgetary) pressure to cut back on our defense presence in Asia. How are we going to stop nuclear proliferation and do that? North Korea makes Japan very nervous. You know, one way that Japan can stimulate its domestic economy is to rearm. . . . I think all this is dangerous, very dangerous.”

Yet the old glue of Washington-Tokyo efforts against a Soviet military threat is gone, and neither the North Korean nuclear weapons program nor anything else is likely to unify the United States and Japan quite as well.

For now, even security issues seem to be as much a source of friction between Washington and Tokyo as of unity. Helping Russia’s democratic reforms is at or near the top of the list of U.S. security objectives. But there is little sign that Japan shares the American enthusiasm for this effort.

Former President Richard Nixon gave voice to the frustration of America’s foreign policy elite recently when he grumbled that Japan’s obsession with retrieving the four small islands off Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido that were occupied by Soviet troops at the end of World War II has hampered international efforts to get financial help to Yeltsin.

“If Mr. Yeltsin fails, they will never get the islands back,” Nixon wrote.

U.S. government specialists said there is no sign yet that Japan is developing more independent military and security policies. But they say it is possible that Tokyo may eventually begin to move in that direction.

“There is a real possibility that the Japanese will begin to hedge, to subordinate U.S.-Japanese security ties to their own more Asia-centered security policy,” one U.S. government analyst said. “They will do this if they think that the Administration’s commitments, its disposition of troops abroad and friction over economic policy, are moving Washington away from a priority on the (U.S.-Japan) alliance.”

Whether this happens or not, experts said Clinton’s remarks already have had an effect, demonstrating a dramatic change in the White House’s attitude toward Japan.

“I don’t know who’s advising him (Clinton),” said Prof. Nathaniel Thayer, a Japan specialist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “But every time he opens his mouth (about Japan), he talks on one matter--and that’s trade--and he says the Japanese are screwing us.”

As a result, Thayer predicted, when the Japanese prime minister arrives in Washington this week, “he’ll be in a defensive mode. He’ll probably back off the airplane.”