Shift Seen in Administration’s Asia Policies : Priorities: U.S. takes a less aggressive stance on human rights, trade issues. The outlined objectives have been put on hold.

When President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher took office, they announced they would redirect U.S. foreign policy to give top emphasis to Asia.

But 18 months into Clinton’s presidency, the Administration is shifting its attention elsewhere as its relationship with Asia becomes more a detriment than a help to Clinton’s political fortunes.

The Administration also is quietly reshaping U.S. policy toward Asia in a way that de-emphasizes the principal goals--such as improving human rights and reducing the trade deficit with Japan--that Clinton outlined when he took office.

For now, the effect is a much less assertive--and, critics say, a much weaker--policy in Asia that is less confrontational toward the established order there.

Having discovered that he lacks the ability to make quick, dramatic changes in America’s ties with the major Asian powers, Clinton seems to be lowering his sights and concentrating on other parts of the world.

“Every Administration comes to power feeling it has to change something. And often, what they feel they have to change doesn’t need to be changed,” said former U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Nicholas Platt, now president of the private, nonprofit Asia Society. “The fact that they are going back to (former President George) Bush’s policy toward Asia doesn’t make them look good. But it doesn’t make me feel bad.”

When the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations meets in Bangkok, Thailand, this week for its first conference on regional security, the secretary of state will be back in Washington working on the Middle East, attending the White House meeting between Jordan’s King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott will stand in for Christopher at the Thailand meeting--characterized as “historic” by U.S. officials--which will also be attended by the Russian and Chinese foreign ministers.

“I talked to him (Christopher) personally. He really was agonized about this,” Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said in an interview last week. “And it’s disappointing. There’s no way around that. Having said that, Strobe Talbott is an important figure in his own right. He’s very close to the President. He’s obviously highly respected and articulate.”

In contrast, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III once raised eyebrows by wondering aloud whether he could skip one of ASEAN’s annual summer meetings. The sessions require an arduous and time-consuming trip across the Pacific, but in the end, Baker always felt obliged to attend.

During Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and in Christopher’s confirmation hearings as secretary of state, the two men placed a strong emphasis on the importance of reducing the trade deficit with Japan and improving human rights in China. Yet over the past 18 months, these objectives have not been achieved.

The imbalance with Japan is still running at about $60 billion a year, a level that Clinton and his top aides branded unacceptable. And the Administration has been unable to persuade Japan to negotiate the trade agreements envisioned when the President went to Tokyo a year ago.

Of course, it takes two governments to make a trade deal. U.S. officials now point to the past year’s political upheaval in Tokyo as a prime cause for the inability to make economic progress.

“No strategy is going to work miracles when they (the Japanese) have four or five governments in the course of a year,” Lord said. “We really don’t feel we had a fair test of our approach on the economic issues because of the constant changing of the Japanese political leadership.”

But critics say Clinton Administration officials made a strategic error by pinning too much of their hopes on the ability of Japan’s political leadership to effect change.

“They need to understand that the Japanese prime minister is never able to do anything,” said Chalmers Johnson, UC San Diego professor emeritus and a veteran scholar on Japan. “The Japanese government is a puppet, and they need to talk to the puppeteers”--the career bureaucrats who call the shots for elected officials and who have been severely criticized by the Clinton Administration.

“In attacking the Japanese bureaucrats, they displayed unbelievable political naivete,” Johnson said.

On human rights, the situation has in some ways become worse, not better. Clinton tried linking the renewal of China’s trade benefits to improvements in human rights, but in May he was forced to back off and renew the benefits after admitting progress had been minimal.

This appears to have emboldened the Chinese leadership into thinking it can arrest or imprison its citizens without fear of penalty from the United States.

After 14 years in jail, a prominent Chinese dissident, Wei Jingsheng, was freed in September, at a time when Beijing was trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to land the Olympic Games for the year 2000. But he was thrown back into prison early this year after he met with Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, John Shattuck, and he remains there today with the charges against him still unspecified.

Since its decision in May to renew China’s trade benefits, the Clinton Administration has not mentioned Wei’s name publicly.

Human rights groups tried to pressure the Administration into taking up Wei’s case at the recent Group of Seven summit of industrialized nations in Naples, Italy, hoping for a collective statement on Wei’s behalf. But White House officials denied the request.

“From our point of view, this is the worst-case scenario, that the Chinese feel there is no price to be paid whatsoever for continued political repression in the name of guaranteeing social stability,” said Mike Jendrzejczyk, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch/Asia.

U.S. officials say they have raised Wei’s case in private talks with their Chinese counterparts. Clinton and his aides also insist that they are still trying to work on human rights improvements and assert that the Administration’s China policy should be judged by yardsticks other than human rights.

“I don’t buy the premise of believing that you’re going to identify the most difficult, tough problems and then judge everything by whether we solve them,” Lord said. “We will keep after them. But I would point out that there are other goals besides human rights.”

The Administration’s about-face on China has embittered former U.S. officials who remember well how Clinton, at the 1992 Democratic Convention, lambasted the Bush Administration for “coddling dictators” in Beijing.

“They’re reversing themselves and restoring a policy that they savaged (Bush National Security Adviser Brent) Scowcroft for. And now they’re trying to present it as a great strategic breakthrough,” said James R. Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to China. “They can’t hide the record of what they stood for then and what they stand for now.”

Increasingly, the initiative on China policy within the Administration is moving to the Defense Department, which has been seeking to upgrade U.S. military ties with the People’s Liberation Army.

Adm. Charles R. Larson, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, recently visited Beijing. The PLA’s deputy chief of staff will come to Washington in August, and Defense Secretary William J. Perry is expected to travel to Beijing this fall.

Human rights groups worry that the Administration’s turnabout on China foreshadows an even broader retreat for U.S. efforts to promote human rights and democracy elsewhere in Asia, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar (formerly Burma).

Last week, Clinton issued a strong statement in support of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who has been kept under house arrest by military officials in Myanmar for five years. “This issue remains a priority for my Administration,” Clinton said.

But his Administration seems less willing than ever before to back up such statements with tough actions.

“While important symbolically, calling for Aung San Suu Kyi’s release is cost-free,” Jendrzejczyk said. “That’s what human rights has been relegated to in Asia. Rhetoric is cheap.”

To some extent, the Administration has been obliged to tone down its policies toward China and Japan to win support for its stance against North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons program. “We (the United States and China) have worked well together on Korea,” Lord said.

U.S. officials are now working hard for change in American policy toward smaller countries in the region. For example, Lord has spearheaded improvements in ties with Vietnam and New Zealand.

But the Administration is also finding that its original human rights and trade goals are not so easy to achieve because America’s clout in Asia is diminishing.

The state-controlled Chinese news magazine Liaowang gloated last month that the policy announced by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake last fall of “enlarging” democratic forces around the world had failed. “The U.S. strength is not equal to its ambition to seek sole global hegemony,” the publication said.