NEWS ANALYSIS : New Preference for Asia Meshes With Clinton’s Style

During his first 10 months in the White House, it has become increasingly clear that Asia is President Clinton’s favorite continent, the one part of the world where he feels most confident and most directly involved in foreign policy issues.

Clinton’s predecessor, George Bush, prided himself on his European ties, regularly working the phones to chat with French President Francois Mitterrand, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl or British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

That isn’t Clinton’s style. In fact, at the meeting of Asian and Pacific leaders that ended here Saturday, Clinton for the first time made his geographical preference a matter of U.S. policy.

American diplomacy, the President declared, will be focused increasingly across the Pacific. While insisting he didn’t mean to slight Europe, he explained at one point that “we must focus our global initiatives on the fastest-growing regions” of the world.

The heightened concentration on Asia will continue this week, as Clinton greets South Korean President Kim Young Sam and Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos at the White House, and as his Administration unveils what is vaguely described as a new initiative toward solving the crisis over North Korea’s effort to acquire nuclear weapons.

Why Asia? What is it about Asia that Clinton likes so much? The answer seems to be a blend of foreign policy, economics and Clinton’s own political style.

In foreign policy, Asia is the region where Clinton has, so far, avoided quagmires and disasters.

During his first year in office, he has been besieged by a series of rocky foreign policy problems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia and Haiti, all of which exposed indecisiveness and other flaws in his foreign policy team.

All three raised the questions of whether and how to use military force overseas, a sensitive subject for Clinton personally, because of his lack of military service.

In Asia, at least so far, the issues are much more economic than military in nature. And it is on these economic subjects that Clinton feels most sure of himself. Also, the Pacific fits directly into his Administration’s emerging strategy for rebuilding the American domestic economy.

“What it really is is an American President recognizing what a lot of private companies have recognized,” said Clinton’s economic policy chief Robert E. Rubin. “We’re dependent on world trade.”

For most of the last half a century, Americans who advocated engagement abroad have done so on the grounds of military security. America needed to be involved overseas, presidents from Harry S. Truman to Bush argued, to counter the power of Communist regimes and to defend nations friendly to American interests.

Clinton’s approach, by contrast, resembles that of an earlier generation of American internationalists who argued at the beginning of this century that the country should abandon the isolation of its first hundred years and pursue commercial ties abroad.

Finally, Asia also fits well into Clinton’s own style of politics: bargaining and building coalitions.

Bush had few fixed views on domestic policy, but had some firm foreign policy principles, based largely on preserving the role America played in the Cold War.

Clinton has a more fixed view of where he wants to go on domestic policy--and he is willing to innovate in his foreign policy, at least toward Asia, to achieve these domestic goals.

He and his Administration are alternately tough and accommodating with Japan on trade issues. They alternately denounce China’s human rights record, in ways that please U.S. labor leaders, then clear the way for supercomputer sales to Beijing to please business leaders.

So far, Asia qualifies more as Clinton’s good-luck charm than as an unqualified foreign policy success. But it is clear that in the first year of his Administration, Clinton has shifted America’s foreign policy goals in a new direction.

“We are a two-ocean country, but we have more trade going across the Pacific than across the Atlantic,” one White House official observed. “I don’t think there’s any doubt where our economic interests lie.”

* ASIA-PACIFIC SYMBOLISM: APEC was short on substance and long on symbolism. D1