NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Dogged by Failure to Clarify Foreign Policy : Politics: Basic questions about when to deploy troops go unanswered. Critics say White House is improvising.

The Clinton Administration, its foreign policy under attack as being improvised and ill-considered, dodged a Senate threat to curtail the President’s powers last week, but it has failed to resolve the underlying issue that caused the Senate revolt in the first place: When should American lives be risked in Third World conflicts?

“This is the hardest question” the Administration faces, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake said in an interview. It is a question Clinton aides have grappled with for nine months without clear resolution.

In the absence of guiding principles to determine when to get involved overseas, under what conditions and with how much force, the Administration seems condemned to move from crisis to crisis--ignoring some conflicts, using force in others, pushing forward today, pulling back tomorrow.

Critics call it sailing without a rudder.

Administration officials deny the charge. Some, most notably Secretary of State Warren Christopher, argue that abstract theories and overarching “frameworks” are of little help in resolving specific problems.

Others point out, with considerable truth, that the George Bush Administration never really developed a complete set of post-Cold War policies to govern American involvement overseas either, and they complain that the current White House is being held to a different standard.

But President Clinton may have no choice but to live with a higher standard. Unlike Bush, he came into office facing a public--here and abroad--that questioned his qualifications in foreign affairs. The President suffered from an obvious lack of foreign policy experience when he was elected, and the seeming uncertainty of his policies since the inauguration has fed doubts about whether he and his foreign policy team are up to the job.

Now, in view of the events of the past three weeks--the U.S. backpedaling in Somalia coupled with a stalemate in Haiti--the doubts have grown, leading many in Congress and elsewhere, including Democratic loyalists, to call on Clinton to make a dramatic move by firing someone on his foreign policy team. Some aim at Christopher, others at Lake, still others at Defense Secretary Les Aspin.

White House officials bridle at such talk, insisting that critics are blowing problems out of proportion. “It’s an overreaction,” one senior aide said of the calls for resignations. But, he conceded, “we’ve lost ground on confidence and competence.”

White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, stating what has become the Administration’s standard response to the criticism, argued Friday that “our foreign policy is much broader than some of the issues that we’ve been dealing with lately.”

“While Haiti, Bosnia and Somalia have certainly been the most talked about topics--and they’re certainly very important and difficult problems--perhaps the problems that are most important to the future of the country and our strategic interests are issues like Russia, non-proliferation (of nuclear arms), the economic future of this country, of Europe, of Asia. . . . We’re continuing to make progress and do a lot of work on these things.

“I think the President is fully satisfied with his foreign policy team. He has great confidence in them, and I don’t expect to see any changes,” Myers said.

Even some Republican critics say the calls for firings or resignations may be premature. “This has not been their finest hour, but the criticism is not job-threatening yet,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

But regardless of whether the Administration’s top policy-makers hold their jobs, the criticism of them has been severe.

“We’ve been waiting nearly a year for them to come up with an overall foreign policy, and it hasn’t arrived yet,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that doles out foreign aid.

Another Senate Democrat, echoing a charge that Republicans made openly on the Senate floor, observed, “Increasingly, it looks like amateur hour in American foreign policy.”

Richard Haas, a former National Security Council staff member now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that “the real danger” in the Administration’s appearance of drift is not immediate damage to U.S. interests but a longer-term loss of credibility.

For example, when former President Ronald Reagan claimed in 1983 that the United States had vital interests in Lebanon, only to yank U.S. troops out of the country after 241 were killed by a terrorist bomb, the sudden switch had no immediate impact on American interests, Haas notes. Seven years later, however, memories of that experience helped convince Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that America would not have the stomach to oppose his invasion of Kuwait.

Several factors aggravate Clinton’s credibility problems.

On some basic issues there are sharp divisions within the Administration. The White House began an early formal review of U.S. involvement in peacekeeping operations and multilateral actions but later bogged down in hopeless conflict between the State Department and the Pentagon, which was reluctant to see American forces go overseas except under the strictest conditions.

That dispute led to a second round of study, which formed the basis for a series of speeches on foreign affairs that the Administration’s top policy-makers delivered in late September. But the final Presidential Review Document that is meant to formalize Administration policy has still not been agreed upon, officials say.

There is also a strain in the President’s relationship with the military--partly a result of his lack of service in Vietnam, partly of his policies toward gays in the military, partly of a huge cultural gap between the officer corps and the young, generally liberal aides gathered around the White House.

That strain guarantees a steady stream of unflattering comments directed at the President by military officials--comments that quickly work their way into news reports and congressional debates.

Another problem, largely out of Clinton’s control, is the absence of a national consensus on what the aims of U.S. foreign policy should be now that the Cold War is over. Past Presidents could count on such consensus when they got into trouble overseas.

Administration officials insist that some of the problems that beset them are merely the sort of first-year mistakes that every White House team makes. Four years ago, for example, the Bush White House was shaken by a botched coup in Panama, when the United States failed to reinforce Panamanian officers who had been encouraged to try to overthrow Gen. Manuel A. Noriega.

Administration officials plead guilty to one major criticism: that Clinton and his top aides have done a poor job of explaining to the country why foreign policy matters and why American forces should be involved overseas.

Given the speed with which events are reported and powerful images relayed by television, “there is no way--once you get a terrible incident--that we can catch up and make clear” what the policy is, Lake said. “We have to do a better job of explaining why we are involved and lay a base” of support for policy before trouble develops.

That issue might, at first glance, seem to involve nothing more than public relations.

But explaining a policy and rallying the public to support it is at the heart of the President’s job in foreign affairs. Historically, Americans have tended to shy away from involvement overseas. A key part of the President’s role has been to explain why Americans should drop that reluctance in any given instance.

Since the beginning of his Administration, Clinton has avoided that role, concentrating primarily on domestic affairs.

That puts a greater premium on the ability of his chief deputies to explain what American interests are overseas. So far, however, Lake has been reluctant to make public speeches and TV appearances, and even Christopher’s aides concede that the secretary of state’s dry, lawyerly presentations are not ideally suited for a broadcast age.

Clinton’s reticence is no accident, of course. Bush paid dearly at the polls last November for the public perception that he cared more about problems in the Mideast than the Midwest. Clinton has no intention of repeating that error.

And while Bush focused attention on his foreign policy interests with five separate overseas trips in his first year in office, Clinton will probably end this year with only two foreign journeys--his trip to the economic summit of industrial nations in Tokyo this past summer and his meeting with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin in Vancouver, Canada, in April.

Times staff writers John M. Broder and Michael Ross contributed to this article.