NEWS ANALYSIS : TRADE TALKS IN THE PACIFIC : Trade Proving to Be Island of Calm in Sea of Troubles Faced by Clinton : Politics: Embattled President can point to a string of successes despite disappointments in other areas.

With Washington in turmoil and his party racked with post-election anguish, President Clinton’s trip to distant Indonesia this week might seem a masterpiece of ill timing.

It might, except that its chief subject, trade, has gradually emerged as one of the strongest elements in his foreign policy--and one that figures to be even more vital to him politically in the next two years.

As health care reform has come unstrung and some other parts of his domestic agenda have bogged down, Clinton and his economic team have ground out a string of large and small wins on trade and laid the groundwork for others. Last week’s Democratic electoral rout promises to give trade even more prominence for the embattled President as one enterprise he can pursue partly without congressional assent.

To date, the Administration has successfully pushed passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, increased government promotion of U.S. exports, advanced some regional economic initiatives and generally raised the diplomatic prominence of trade issues. If December brings the congressional adoption of the massive General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Clinton will have grounds for some serious boasting.

Indeed, some experts say trade is the one area of clarity and resolve in a foreign policy that has often been fogbound.

In this eight-day trip, Clinton hopes to push the transpacific trade group called the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to a general timetable for free trade. And next month he will head to Miami to talk to Latin American leaders about trade liberalization at the Summit of the Americas.

Clinton has been championing the notion of the big payoff from greater trade since his campaign days: It was, in fact, the fifth paragraph of his campaign announcement speech in the fall of 1991.

Now it is routinely referred to in speeches as a wellspring of hope in an American future that otherwise looks all too bleak. His trade strategy, he said last week at Georgetown University, is a “strategy to help every American family, every American worker . . . from the worldwide growth and prosperity it will bring.”

All this is fraught with irony.

In 1992, Clinton built his challenge to President George Bush’s foreign policy around assertions that Bush was not wary enough on NAFTA, was too cozy with the Chinese and was a pushover in the face of the Japanese trade juggernaut.

Now when trade issues clash with other concerns, the others give way.

The Administration decontrolled high-technology exports in 1993--in a big boost for California--though the Pentagon feared the move could put sophisticated weapons in dangerous hands. It renewed most-favored-nation trading status for China last May, despite the objections of human-rights advocates.

In Monday’s meeting between Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, trade and North Korea topped the agenda, while human rights was again present but secondary. “They stuck to the strategic elements of our relationship,” as one senior Administration official put it.

Clinton arrived in Jakarta on Sunday as some East Timor dissidents were demonstrating, and others rioting, to publicize their complaints of Indonesian government oppression. But while Clinton has carefully assured the world that in Wednesday’s meeting with Indonesian President Suharto he will discuss human rights, it was also clear that he does not want these concerns to derail the economic summit or relations with the world’s fourth-largest nation.

Another irony lies in the fact that the most immediate beneficiary of all these efforts--American business--has remained stubbornly resistant to Clinton’s efforts to win its approval. “This Administration has bent over backwards for business on trade: NAFTA, big tax breaks, export promotion, you name it,” said one aide. But the response from business is only bitter rejection, he added.

Some analysts believe that if the Republicans continue their gradual drift toward protectionism, Clinton could actually begin capturing some of their supporters because of his trade-opening efforts. But that has yet to happen.

And while he hasn’t won business over, his free-trade tilt has caused plenty of problems with his core constituency of labor, as well as countless non-unionized workers who see open borders as a threat to their jobs, their future and their children’s future.

Clinton recognizes how hard it is to sell the blessings of freer trade to nervous American workers. “For too many of our people, trade appears to be a gale-force wind, just another threat ready to blow away the prospects of a stable job at a good wage,” the President said Thursday.

These days, he’s crowing about how the North American trade pact boosted exports to Mexico 20% in the first six months after it was passed, creating as many as 100,000 jobs. And he’s insisting that trade efforts must be coupled with efforts to help American workers compete in the new economy.

But now, as Administration officials and free-trade advocates say the need for liberalization is becoming more important, polls show public support is declining. And the opposition of workers could become truly brutal if the economy went into a tailspin and the outside world suddenly seemed even more threatening.

Though Bush worked hard for NAFTA, Clinton has clearly pushed harder on trade generally. Bush had the patrician Republican’s belief in the benefits of open trade, but he wasn’t as eager to use government to make it happen.

In some ways, it may be easier for Clinton to push formation of new trade groups. His advocacy will not bring the same fierce opposition from human rights and environmental groups that a Republican’s effort would have engendered.

Indeed, some analysts argue that Bush could never have rounded up the more than 100 Democratic votes Clinton lined up--painfully--for the NAFTA vote.

Clinton clearly believes in the issue. And it fills his need for the kind of hope-inspiring message that can be so useful to presidents.

“When I became President, I did not want to see this world polarized by trading blocs that would take the place of the nuclear blocs of the Cold War,” Clinton said Monday.

Clinton’s efforts with the 17 Asia-Pacific countries, which range from China and Brunei to South Korea and Chile, show the value--and the political limits--of his trade efforts.

Clinton and his aides lay out a compelling rationale for this Asia economic strategy.

As he said Monday, the region already accounts for about a third of the exports to the United States, and about 2 million American jobs. “The American people cannot be as prosperous as they need to be unless we succeed here in Asia,” he said.

The talk of APEC produced another benefit: It helped scare some European nations into accepting GATT as a means of diminishing the threat of an exclusive Asian trading bloc.

The bad news is that with NAFTA in the bag and GATT’s completion almost in view, the next big advances in free trade are some distance off.

Despite confident predictions of some Administration officials that this meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group will deliver another “quantum leap” advance, the immediate future is likely to hold only incremental advances.

Moreover, some analysts predict that Clinton’s political weakness and the growing momentum of protectionist sentiment could force him to slow his efforts. Last week, Clinton suddenly began again using his campaign-year rhetoric of “fair trade” instead of “free trade,” suggesting that the United States needs to push the kind of tough line that may not yield further concessions.

And, too, there is the sobering possibility that GATT may be torpedoed in its final hours, perhaps over concern about the threat to national sovereignty posed by its successor organization.

Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who will become the new Speaker of the House, has declared this week that he will work for it, and that will help. Some Administration officials think Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), soon to be Senate majority leader, will join in if he can strike a deal to get support for a capital gains tax cut in return.

But victory is not in the bag. And a loss on GATT would be devastating to the President, and at least slow his market-opening efforts.