Critics See Foreign Ties as a Leash Around U.S. Neck : Sovereignty: In a familiar debate, the White House is accused of giving too much control to other nations.

The ghost of Henry Cabot Lodge is stalking President Clinton.

Seventy-five years ago, in the aftermath of World War I, Sen. Lodge successfully led the fight against President Woodrow Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, arguing that it would give other countries too much power over U.S. policy on trade, immigration and committing troops to war.

Echoes of the argument rang through Congress last week, where a shifting amalgam of conservatives and liberals accused Clinton of giving international institutions like the United Nations, the successor of the League of Nations, too much influence over U.S. policy--not only abroad but at home.

The charge that Clinton is ceding control over American affairs to international bureaucracies--or put another way, compromising the nation’s sovereignty--is now opening a debate about America’s role in the world in two key arenas.

On one front, Clinton is facing a phalanx of critics--led by many of the Republicans likely to seek the party’s presidential nomination in 1996 but also including some Democrats--who want to diminish U.S. reliance on the United Nations and pursue a more independent course of action in Bosnia, North Korea and elsewhere.

On a second front, Clinton is trying to push a new world trade treaty through Congress over the objections of critics who say the pact would give other nations power to undermine a vast array of U.S. environmental and worker-safety laws.

These debates cut to central choices about how America pursues its international objectives in the post-Cold War era. The Administration--believing that the demise of the Cold War rivalry has made possible international cooperation on an unprecedented scale--has generally sought to increase the power of multilateral institutions such as U.N. peacekeeping operations and the world trade organization. Their argument is that coordinated multinational action is the best way to deal with economic and security problems around the globe--particularly at a time when the United States cannot afford to shoulder all burdens by itself.

But they have faced an intense backlash--and have already been forced to retreat on some fronts--by critics who complain that relying so heavily on the U.N. and other international institutions has limited America’s freedom to maneuver.

“We are seeing that this staunchly internationalist vision of what the world should become has a great many holes in it,” said Alan Tonelson, research director at the Economic Strategy Institution in Washington.

Administration officials said Clinton is merely pursuing the cooperation necessary in an increasingly interdependent world. They flatly reject the contention that he is reducing U.S. freedom to act unilaterally--either in foreign or economic policy.

“This is not a new argument in American politics,” said U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor. “It comes up historically with any international agreement America has ever entered of any note.”

Indeed, the fear that national leaders will compromise U.S. sovereignty to international institutions has been a steady background hum in American politics throughout this century, particularly among conservatives fearful of anything that looks like “world government.”

Those concerns played critical roles in the Senate decisions to reject American participation in the League of Nations after World War I and the International Trade Organization after World War II.

But for most of the last 40 years, these apprehensions have been confined largely to an extremist fringe, such as the handful of conservatives who blocked U.S. adoption of a treaty on genocide for almost four decades.

Now these arguments are being propelled back toward center stage--partly by the GOP search for new lines of attack on Clinton but also by changes in the international environment. Beyond the partisan dimensions, Tonelson noted, these debates have been sharpened by two powerful trends: the increased reliance on U.N. peacekeeping forces made possible by the end of the superpower rivalry, and the growing demands for new rules and institutions to run the integrating global economy.

In trade, the crux of concern about eroding sovereignty is the mechanism for settling international economic disputes. Under existing trade laws, countries can challenge other nations’ domestic economic or regulatory rules as unfair trade practices by bringing cases before panels authorized by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the agreement that sets worldwide trading rules.

Using that process, for instance, Mexico and the European Union have won judgments condemning the U.S. ban on tuna caught with nets that imperil dolphins. Another GATT panel is reportedly nearing a decision on a European case charging that U.S. fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles penalize European manufacturers, such as Mercedes-Benz.

The existing procedures have a huge loophole: Under current GATT rules, the country that loses a decision can block the implementation of sanctions to enforce it. But the new GATT treaty--which Congress must still approve--closed that escape hatch and denied a nation the ability to block rulings against it.

As Administration officials quickly pointed out, that does not mean that the new World Trade Organization created in the treaty can order the United States to change a law that it considers in violation of international trade rules, such as the tuna ban. But it does mean that the country challenging the law will be legally authorized to impose sanctions or tariffs on U.S. products if Congress does not change the law.

Kantor said this new mandatory system is in U.S. interests because American firms are more often plaintiffs than defendants in such trade disputes. Congress, he noted, directed the negotiators to produce a tougher system for enforcing decisions.

“We use the dispute settlement in the GATT more than any other country on Earth,” he said. “We were frustrated by the European Community (now the EU) especially in the ‘80s, time after time, by their blocking dispute-settlement rulings.”

But consumer activist Ralph Nader and other critics--who aired their critiques at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing Friday--worry that the mandatory system will provide a new avenue for domestic special interests, working in concert with foreign countries, to challenge environmental or occupational-health laws as unfair trade practices. Faced with the prospect of sanctions, he said, Congress will be under enormous pressure to change offending statutes.

Treaty supporters insisted that Nader overstated the risk of the new trade organization ruling against U.S. laws. But they acknowledged that some reversals may be the price of compelling others to abide by decisions that go against them. “It would be disingenuous to suggest that a system that benefits you as a plaintiff would have no consequences as a defendant,” said one senior Administration official.

Despite these concerns, Congress is likely to approve the new trade order. But it may not sit still for too many international judgments that challenge U.S. laws, noted an aide to one senior Democrat who supports the treaty. “If what we see as a result of the WTO is a cascade of filings, the system is going to fail,” he said.

A similar balancing between the desire for international cooperation and unfettered freedom of action runs through the debate over sovereignty in security affairs.

Since the Vietnam War, U.S. leaders have regularly demanded greater burden-sharing from our allies. But under Clinton, the issue has flipped from concerns that American allies were not doing enough to fear that they have moved into the driver’s seat.

In what appears certain to be a central count of the GOP case in 1996, Republicans now routinely charge that Clinton has neutered U.S. foreign policy by only acting through the United Nations and with the approval of our allies. “It has become an excuse for not acting,” said Jack Kemp, a former Cabinet member under President George Bush and possible Republican presidential contender in 1996. “You can say: ‘We would have done something, but we couldn’t get the French or the British to go along at the U.N.’ ”

Vice President Al Gore inadvertently provided the critics with a powerful example when he traveled to Marrakech, Morocco, in April for the signing of the new world trade agreement. Gore appeared hours after U.S. planes enforcing an allied “no fly” zone over northern Iraq accidentally shot down two U.S. helicopters, killing 15 Americans and 11 foreign officials. “I want to extend condolences,” Gore said, “to the families of those who died in the service of the United Nations.”

On Thursday, in a tone of enthusiastic disdain, House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) threw those words back at the Administration. “When our men and women are killed on the battlefield,” he declared during debate on a measure to bar U.S. forces from serving under U.N. commanders, “they do not die in the service of the United Nations. They die in the service of the United States of America.”

The fear that Clinton has excessively deferred to the United Nations drove Thursday’s stunning House vote calling on the Administration to unilaterally breach the U.N. arms embargo barring aid to the Bosnian Muslims. Similar concerns also powered the GOP amendment to bar U.S. forces from serving under foreign commanders in U.N. operations.

That amendment--like an earlier Senate Republican effort--failed on a party line vote. But those clear expressions of congressional dissatisfaction--reinforced by the disillusionment that followed the ill-fated U.S.-led operation in Somalia--have already deflated the Administration’s enthusiasm for participating in multinational U.N. peacekeeping operations, once touted by Clinton as a key to American engagement with the world.

As a candidate, Clinton called for a dramatic expansion of U.N. authority, suggesting a standing multinational rapid-deployment force that could be used for peacekeeping, “standing guard at the borders of countries threatened by aggression” and preventing “violence against civilian populations. . . .”

That expansive vision of an independent U.N. force--one that many liberals have harbored for decades--”was dumped on day one” after Clinton took office, said one Administration official. “The first meeting that was held on peacekeeping (policy) everybody said: ‘That’s unrealistic, let’s put that on the back burner.’ ”

By the time the Administration put out a presidential directive on peacekeeping last May, it sharply limited U.S. participation in U.N. military operations--and the circumstances when U.S. forces taking part in such operations could serve under foreign commanders. Those guidelines are so restrictive that other nations now largely blame American reluctance for delaying dispatch of a U.N. peacekeeping force to Rwanda.

One Administration national security strategist agreed that early in his term Clinton had a propensity to view the United States in these U.N. deliberations “as just one more vote. . . . There were times when we were not willing to assert our own proportional weight in a collective manner.”

But the strategist insisted that even if chastened about the need to exert leadership, the United States must continue to seek multinational cooperation--both to share military burdens that the nation is unwilling to shoulder alone and to ensure concerted action against outlaw countries such as Iraq and North Korea.

“If the U.S. says we are basically going to break any embargo the U.N. put together that we don’t agree with, it is going to be hard to argue to other sovereign nations that they should abide by embargoes we support,” he said.

The argument that the United States cannot afford to routinely act alone has undeniable force. Even Kemp insists that his criticism does not mean “to suggest we should be like the lone cowboy in foreign policy.” But the recoil from U.N. peacekeeping, the reluctance to defer to the United Nations on the arms embargo in Bosnia and the anxiety about binding dispute resolution through the new World Trade Organization suggest that fears of eroding sovereignty that jolted the League of Nations 75 years ago still carry a charge in American politics today.

Both Clinton and his critics are trying to thread the needle between views that are close to contradictory: the beliefs that this nation cannot afford to act alone yet must not excessively rely on allies. In their struggles stand the continuing evidence of America’s uncertainty about how to define and advance its aims in a world no longer defined by the Cold War.

Times staff writer Art Pine contributed to this story.