Virtual policy: the administration in two years has imperiled the work of fifty years in the Far East.

The Administration in two years has imperiled the work of fifty years in the Far East.

SINCE the end of World War II, the United States has largely shaped the contours of the Asia - Pacific region. Our open markets and our security umbrella have helped produce an unparalleled economic miracle benefiting Americans and Asians alike. In two short years the Clinton Adminis-tration has cast a shadow over America's credibility and future in the region.

The Administration can claim the rare achievement of imperiling relations with Japan and China simultaneously; this is the result of a set of initiatives that make its Bosnia policy look like high strategy. The ink was not dry on the recent auto deal with Japan before the U.S. Trade Representative took up the Kodak film case. U.S. - China ties are so tattered that Peking has recalled its ambassador, while fresh evidence of Chinese missile exports to Pakistan suggests a deepening spiral of conflict. And if all that weren't enough, a truculent North Korea threatens to rip up the UN armistice even as the U.S. and South Korea shower it with nuclear concessions, oil, and rice.

All this is hardly what President Clinton seemed to promise in July 1993 when he offered an inspiring vision of a `new Pacific community,' and then hosted an unprecedented gathering of Asia - Pacific leaders in Seattle. A combination of wrong-headed ideas, special-interest-driven policies, and dysfunctional rhetoric has produced the current state of affairs.

Particularly troubling is a contempt for language and for the public, reflecting either an Orwellian belief that official rhetoric need not have any resemblance to reality, or a sense that public policy can be changed cost-free with each 24-hour news cycle. How else to explain incidents such as these:

-- After Secretary of Defense William Perry calls North Korea the most dangerous security threat in the world, Secretary of State Warren Christopher misstates his own Korea policy before Congress on the eve of talks with Pyongyang. Even as his negotiators desperately try to implement the October 1994 accord seeking to end Pyongyang's nuclear-weapons program, an essay under Christopher's name appears in Foreign Policy magazine absurdly proclaiming that `Last October, this Administration ended it.'

-- The Secretary of State tells his Chinese counterpart that he will deny Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui a visa for a visit to his college reunion, publicly accepting Peking's argument that it would violate our `one China' agreements. Days later, his Department says it is issuing a visa because of `congressional pressure' and as it is a private visit.

-- After two years of `results-oriented' trade negotiations with Japan, the trade deficit has grown to a record $66 billion. After demanding that Tokyo guarantee auto-parts import numbers, the Administration blinked, accepted a private-sector-driven deal with no assured results, and declared victory.

Such developments are merely the latest evidence of what Mr. Clinton's top Asia advisor, Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, warned last year was an `emerging malaise' in U.S. policy. In May 1994, a leaked memo to Christopher from Lord cautioned that ``Asia and others view us as placating domestic special-interests groups and criticize us for tactics that destabilize relationships which are central to the region's peace and prosperity.'

In fact, the problem is not malaise, it is self-inflicted marginalization. How did this come about? First, the Administration put political and security issues with Japan on the back burner, arguing that it was economics that needed attention. Ignoring the reality of a Japan suffering from political crisis, three years of zero growth, and a $570-billion banking crisis, the Administration first talked down the dollar (which it is now intervening to push up) and tried to reinvent the wheel by creating a new `framework' for U.S. - Japan economic ties. However defensible the substance of efforts to open Japan's markets, tactics of public confrontation produced the exact opposite result, a Japan that said no. Not only did the bully-boy approach fail to reduce trade imbalances, but it also poisoned public opinion on both sides of the Pacific.

If the Clinton Administration's Japan policy leaves much to be desired, its China policy -- attempting to meet the key challenge of managing the emergence of a new global power -- has been so bungled that we are now in danger of an escalating cycle of conflict.

Trying to have it both ways, trade and human rights, President Clinton renewed China's Most Favored Nation status by Executive Order in June 1993, but, in response to pressure from Congress, worded the Order so as to make MFN renewal contingent on specific human-rights improvements.

That strategy effectively boxed the President in. But an indignant China bet on capitalist greed and on the pattern of waffling that Clinton had already demonstrated in Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. And after publicly humiliating the Secretary of State in March 1994, Peking's octogenarians were proved correct in May, as Clinton changed course and renewed MFN unconditionally, announcing a policy of constructive engagement. The price of Clinton's belated adoption of the right course was U.S. credibility -- which his flip-flopcracy has regularly squandered.

Moreover, the MFN decision was largely a response rather than part of a coherent China strategy. Thus, from nuclear proliferation and human rights to trade and Taiwan, a pile of contentious issues continues to fester. A fluid leadership succession in Peking, where no Chinese leader can be viewed as `soft' on the United States, combined with the widespread Chinese misperception that the explanation for the United States' disconnected policy decisions is that Washington seeks a weak and divided China, makes the situation ripe for missteps on both sides.

In any case, a Japan that said no was matched by a China that said no. Not to mention a North Korea that said maybe. This, after the President had declared, `North Korea cannot be allowed to get nuclear weapons,' while his own CIA said it may already have one or two.

All the Administration's missteps in the Pacific are papered over by continued use of boiler-plate rhetoric. Witness Winston Lord, in a speech in May: `The U.S. has the capability, credibility, and even-handedness to play honest broker among nervous neighbors, historical enemies, and potential antagonists.' Indeed, the Administration's rhetoric invites the Groucho Marx line from Duck Soup, `Who you gonna believe, me or your own two eyes?'

THE PRICE of mistakes is high, when the fastest-growing economies in the world are coming of age, feeling the weight of their economic success and pride in their social cohesion. The problem is that our leverage in the region is diminishing as our stake is increasing. We must define a new partnership that reflects the region's success. This requires smarter, more supple and sophisticated diplomacy, and more forward-looking concepts. Instead, we have seen the opposite: public hectoring and self-righteous sermonizing, even as our economic weight in the region is viewed as shrinking, and our security role, in the absence of the Cold War, is believed to be problematic.

The ultimate irony is that the goals the Administration has rightly sought -- promotion of democracy, liberalized trade, security cooperation -- are all trends unfolding systematically, but at their own pace. The pattern in the Asia - Pacific region has been that export-growth strategies produce rapid economic growth. At a certain point, an emerging middle class demands more accountable, pluralistic government. This has been the story in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand; indeed, the explosion at Tiananmen was in a sense the result of new social forces produced by economic reforms that China's ossified political system could not contain. Thus Clinton's Asia policies reflect a failure to appreciate trends that are generally going in the direction America wants them to.

The result may be serious damage to U.S. interests if the present backlash continues. If Japan does not believe in the U.S. nuclear umbrella, if China believes the U.S. is a paper tiger, if North Korea believes it can cheat with impunity, if East Asia believes its explosive intra-regional trade and investment reduce the importance of U.S. markets, the results are likely to be a marginalized U.S. role, conventional and nuclear arms races, strategic instability, and jeopardized prosperity.

All the while, Asians make calculations based on long-term trends and current realities in which the U.S. looms smaller. But this is not inevitable. History and geography demand that the U.S. will be a major player in Asia. But our role must change with the times. The President might start by recognizing the first rule when one finds oneself in a hole: Stop digging.