THE 104TH CONGRESS : Dole Hits Clinton on Foreign Policy : Senate: He assails President’s ‘lousy deal’ with North Korea on nuclear weapons. Bosnia, Haiti and U.N. stances are targeted in bills.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) opened an unexpected second front Wednesday in the GOP’s battle with President Clinton: foreign policy.

Dole said that he may try to block any spending to implement Clinton’s nuclear weapons deal with North Korea, and he introduced bills to lift the United Nations arms embargo on Bosnia and to slash U.S. spending on U.N. peacekeeping missions--including the current deployment of troops in Haiti.

If Congress’ new Republican majority follows his lead, it would be a major break from a longstanding--if not always honored--tradition of bipartisanship in foreign policy.

“Where we can cooperate, we plan to cooperate. . . , particularly in areas of foreign policy,” Dole said, invoking the bipartisan ideal.

But he said that he would seek early Senate hearings on the Administration’s deal with North Korea and aides said that he is actively considering trying to stop the arrangement.

Under the agreement negotiated last year, North Korea agreed to stop producing plutonium in exchange for an estimated $4 billion in aid, almost all of it provided by South Korea and Japan. But the United States agreed to supply about $4.7 million worth of fuel oil this month to help meet the communist country’s immediate energy needs.

Dole has called the pact “a lousy deal” and objected particularly to any U.S. aid to North Korea.

White House officials, hoping to head Dole off, warned that he is making a political mistake. “I’m not sure the Republicans will get away with across-the-board opposition” on foreign policy, a senior official said. “I think the Republicans have to be selective in where they confront the Administration, or the American people will conclude that this is simply partisanship.”

The White House official said that the deal with North Korea “is working. We have frozen the North Korean (nuclear) program.”

Dole, 71, has said that he may run for the Republican nomination for President next year.

Dole’s bill on Bosnia would require Clinton to break with the U.N. arms embargo by May 1 and to allow U.S. weapons to flow to the Muslim-led government there unless peace has been achieved.

The State Department criticized the proposal, saying that it could disrupt the recently won cease-fire and lead to a need for U.S. troops to enter the conflict. “It is just the wrong thing to do at this very important point,” State Department spokesman Mike McCurry said.

But Dole said that the threat of U.S. arms shipments would provide “leverage” to force Bosnian Serb rebels, who have been winning on the battlefield, to make a deal with the Bosnian government.

Dole’s peacekeeping bill would restrict U.S. support for U.N. peacekeeping operations by requiring the Administration to find the money to pay for any future missions before voting for them in the U.N. Security Council. And it would slash funding by counting any money spent on U.S. missions like the Haiti operation against the U.S. contribution to the United Nations.

The White House official said that the Administration’s policy in Haiti is working well, and warned: “It would be awfully foolish to give up now.”

On the domestic front, Clinton warned Republicans not to succumb to a tax-cut fever that could cut education spending and threaten the nation’s economic future.

Dedicating an Arkansas elementary school named in his honor, Clinton said that he was returning to Washington after a three-day vacation “to challenge the Congress to do what is necessary to guarantee the future of the next generation of Americans.”

Anyone “can come up and say, ‘I want to give you a tax cut’ and make people happy in the short run,” Clinton said. He said that the tax cuts he has proposed are aimed at allowing Americans to invest in education for themselves and their children, to ensure economic growth.

Clinton’s proposed “middle-class bill of rights” would permit families to deduct up to $10,000 in tuition from their taxes.

Perhaps more revealing of the President’s state of mind as he returned to face the newly powerful Republicans, though, was his lengthy discourse to a group of children at the new William Jefferson Clinton Elementary Magnet School on how to handle criticism.

Seated next to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton amid 32 children, Clinton warned that “too much criticism today is designed to hurt people personally and hurt them in the eyes of other people.”

Those who set high goals, he told the students, will find that “a lot of things will happen in life to discourage you. People will criticize you. You will make honest mistakes.”

But, if you keep your goal firmly in mind “and keep it deep inside . . , you can take all the disappointments and just keep right on going,” he said.

Clinton quoted Benjamin Franklin’s adage that critics are our friends “because they show us our faults.” And Mrs. Clinton, who has also faced political attacks, warned children who seek leadership on their student council that they should expect criticism.

“You will have friends who will say, ‘Why did you do that?’ or ‘I don’t like you anymore,’ ” she said.

The school, which opened last year in the Little Rock suburb of Sherwood, has 600 children enrolled in preschool through sixth grade. The building has a Hillary Rodham Clinton Media Center and a Virginia Kelley Multi-Purpose Room, named after the President’s mother.

A tiny room celebrates the President himself with a collection of Clinton memorabilia, including paintings, photographs, a scrap of lucite-covered floral wallpaper from his childhood home and a dusty saxophone.

McManus reported from Washington and Richter from Sherwood, Ark.