Christopher May Be Sent to Visit Mideast : Diplomacy: If peace talks remain deadlocked, the secretary of state or his top aide could be dispatched to appeal to Israeli, Arab leaders.

Increasingly impatient with the deadlocked Middle East peace talks, the Clinton Administration is considering a high-profile visit to the region to appeal to the top leadership of Israel and its Arab neighbors for the sort of compromise the negotiators seem unable to reach.

State Department officials say the decision on whether Secretary of State Warren Christopher or a ranking aide will tour the Middle East will be made after the 10th round of peace talks ends Thursday. If the negotiators do not score a breakthrough, a new U.S. initiative is likely sometime next month.

In a series of comments during the past few days, Christopher has expressed a soaring optimism that seems strangely out of sync with the plodding pace of the negotiations. Participants say that most significant issues remain unresolved 19 months after the process began at the Madrid peace conference.

“There’s real optimism about what can be achieved (which) leads me to feel the United States ought to spend a lot of its energy . . . in trying to play our role in a very aggressive way,” Christopher said in a recent interview.

Although he declined to spell out his plans in any detail, Christopher said he assigns a very high priority to the negotiations and is ready to travel extensively in the region.

State Department spokesman Mike McCurry said Friday that Washington has concluded that the Israeli, Syrian, Jordanian, Lebanese and Palestinian delegations do not have the mandate to engage in the sort of split-the-difference bargaining required to produce agreements to end almost half a century of conflict.

“We’re not yet satisfied that . . . the delegations have the authority to go beyond familiar positions,” McCurry said.

By dealing directly with the top Arab and Israeli political leadership, Christopher might be able to break that cycle and broker compromise agreements. But success is far from assured because each of the leaders is under substantial pressure not to make any concessions.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has come under relentless attack from right-wing elements who accuse him of going too far already toward meeting Arab demands. Syrian President Hafez Assad faces no similar domestic opposition, but he is a shrewd bargainer and is unlikely to make the first move toward compromise.

Lebanese and Jordanian leaders are afraid to get ahead of the Arab consensus, so no agreement covering those countries is likely until Israel and Syria reach an accord. And the Palestinian delegation is subordinate to the Palestine Liberation Organization, a group that the United States and Israel do not officially recognize.

One senior State Department official said Christopher will travel to the region himself only if he is assured that he will come back with something to show for it.

The secretary and his top strategists were stung by the criticism that followed Christopher’s early May trip to Europe in which he had to take “no” for an answer when he sought support for the Administration’s preferred Bosnia strategy. They clearly do not want to play out that scenario in the Middle East.

The official said that if Christopher decides not to visit the region, he probably will send Dennis B. Ross in his stead. Ross, named earlier this month as the Administration’s point man for the talks, would not have quite so much clout as the secretary of state, but the consequences of failure would be substantially less.