House Approves GOP Defense Bill : Politics: Measure would limit U.S. spending on peacekeeping, push for an expanded NATO. But Democrats dilute some of conservatives’ agenda.

WASHINGTON —  The House approved Republican-sponsored legislation Thursday designed to prod the Clinton Administration to change course on several defense and foreign policies, but only after Democrats succeeded in weakening some of its most controversial provisions.

The legislation, part of the House GOP’s “contract with America,” had been intended to restrict President Clinton’s ability to deploy American troops on U.N. peacekeeping missions, accelerate the deployment of an antiballistic missile defense system and speed up the expansion of NATO.

But Democrats mounted a vigorous counteroffensive. They pushed through amendments that blunted the missile-defense and North Atlantic Treaty Organization provisions and forced Republicans to withdraw a proposal requiring the President to seek Congress’ approval before sending troops on U.N. missions.

Passage ultimately came on a largely party-line vote of 241 to 181--a substantial enough margin but still about 50 votes short of what the Republicans would need to override a veto that Clinton has threatened. Four Republicans and 18 Democrats crossed party lines.

Despite the Democrats’ changes, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Republicans had achieved their major goal in passing the bill--putting the Administration on notice that it would have to “rethink the sort of feckless multilateralism” that he said had characterized its foreign policy.

“We’re trying to send a pretty clear signal,” Gingrich said at a ceremony intended to mark passage of yet another provision in the 10-point contract with America, on which House Republicans ran in the November election.

Rep. Floyd D. Spence (R-S.C.), chairman of the House National Security Committee, and Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House International Affairs Committee, said their panels will recommend more specific proposals throughout the year to flesh out Thursday’s bill.

The measure the House passed included major provisions that:

* Require the Administration to deduct the extra cost of deploying U.S. troops on U.N. peacekeeping missions from the $1-billion annual contribution that Washington makes to the organization’s peacekeeping fund. The United States now bears such extra costs.

* Forbid placing American troops under foreign command in U.N. peacekeeping operations unless the President certifies that the arrangement is needed for national security. Pentagon officials said the provision is unnecessary because U.S. troops are always under American command.

* Cut the American share of U.N. peacekeeping costs to 25% of the total, down from 31.7% now, in line with a change made by Congress last year. But the proposal allows Clinton to exceed the limit by declaring the move is necessary for national security.

* Call on the Administration to develop options for deploying a nationwide antiballistic missile defense system as soon as practical but only after the system has been fully tested and after the Pentagon has paid to improve overall readiness levels in the armed services.

* Call on the Administration to speed the entry of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic into NATO but without the specific fast-track timetable that Republicans earlier had sought to impose.

The measure would also set up an independent commission to review current defense policies. And it urges Congress to reinstate the budgetary fire walls that once prevented lawmakers from raiding the defense budget to finance domestic spending.

The legislation now goes to the Senate, where its future is uncertain.

Although Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) has endorsed several provisions of the bill, the Senate has no comparable legislation in draft form.

Several Democratic lawmakers said they expect Senate Republicans to try to attach elements of the House-passed bill to various measures related to defense and foreign policy that the Senate takes up this year.

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The House fight over the bill this week marked deep-seated divisions between the two parties on an array of defense and foreign-policy issues, both over the pace of new weapons development and on the use of American forces in U.N. peacekeeping missions.

Republicans have been arguing for months that Clinton’s continued deployment of American troops in places such as Somalia, Haiti and even Rwanda has detracted from military preparedness and siphoned off money from Pentagon operations and maintenance funds.

They have also been pressing Clinton to halt the decline in defense spending and to speed deployment of a broad-scale antiballistic missile system.

The Pentagon has said that it is developing such a system but that it first wants to improve battlefield missile defenses.

To the surprise of some critics, the Administration mounted an unusually tough fight against the legislation, with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Defense Secretary William J. Perry warning that it would cripple U.N. peacekeeping efforts and hurt national defense.

On Wednesday, Clinton suggested that he will veto the legislation, saying the restrictions proposed by the measure would impinge on his constitutional authority and were “simply unacceptable.”

The Democratic offensive was at least partly successful. Republicans were forced to withdraw quietly a provision in the original version of the bill that would have required Clinton to seek Congress’ approval before sending U.S. troops on peacekeeping missions.

That provision had been one of the toughest in the original bill.

But some Republicans dropped their support for it after critics pointed out that it could someday hamstring a Republican President.

Republicans also proved unable to muster enough votes Thursday to overturn a previous day’s amendment that had weakened the provision relating to the deployment of a nationwide antiballistic missile defense system.

Questioned later about the GOP decision to back down, Gilman conceded in a news conference: “If we had challenged the (bid to remove it), we might have been defeated.”

Democrats, by contrast, sought to claim victory, despite passage of the legislation.

Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (D-S.C.), author of the amendment that diluted the missile-defense provision, said: “This is a very different bill from what started out.”

Administration officials declined to say late Thursday whether the President’s veto threat remained intact now that the bill has been diluted.