By Tom Plate

The Ear is going to Asia, says the White House.

The White House didn't put the announcement exactly that way, of course. But Vice President Dick Cheney is widely known in Washington to have President Bush's ear. When Cheney talks, Bush listens. And so the Ear is to visit three Asian countries next month — Japan, China and South Korea, in that order.

Cheney's trip is presumably designed to demonstrate his amazing good health, in spite of his well-known heart problems. It might also suggest that Bush has decided to keep him on the ticket.

That's a questionable domestic political call. First time out, Bush desperately needed the Ear, older and presumably wiser, to dim the glare of his sometimes obnoxious Texas cowboy image. Turns out, the Ear was more cowboy policy-wise than the Texan.

This time around, Bush, who will have a hard fight to garner a plurality of votes and earn a true second-term mandate, gains nothing with Cheney still in the second spot. He'd be stronger with perhaps Colin Powell, the popular secretary of state.

Moreover, the Ear now is carrying some heavy domestic political baggage. Along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he is the principal architect of the post-9/11 strategy. The jury is still out on whether it's working, but now there seems to be a critical verdict on the quality of the pre-9/11 planning by this administration. The official nonpartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has so far received shockingly negative testimony on the terrorism-awareness level of the administration's top people.

Coming out of his cave to make this high-profile trip, the Ear will thus need to prove himself in Asia. The problem is he has some foreign-policy baggage that will irk most of the high Asian officials with whom he talks.

That's the administration's hard line on North Korea, of which he is a creator.

Neither China, which has been pressuring North Korea to behave itself at the six-party talks in Beijing, nor Japan, which has plenty of yen to aid Pyongyang if only it will begin to neutralize its nuclear-weapons capabilities, likes the Ear's approach. These countries know it is dangerous to play brinksmanship with the difficult, testy and well-armed North Koreans. They would surely be happy to do some sort of agreed framework revisited (i.e., aid for disarmament, their dollars for regional peace), with the Chinese presumably offering verification.

Trust isn't the issue; verification is. If the Bush administration doesn't want to trust North Korea, it will have to trust China if it doesn't want tension to ratchet up on the Korean peninsula.

But that's what the cocksure North Koreans will do — and they may purposefully and pointedly pull a few tension strings in the heat of the U.S. presidential campaign to embarrass Bush and help Kerry, whom they believe would be less difficult to live with. Call it Pyong-yang's Fall Offensive.

Doing that, however, would run a huge risk: There is every possibility that Bush will be re-elected, with or without the Ear on the ticket. And Bush is not known for being an easygoing, forgive-and-forget kind of person.

Even so, whether the Ear stays on the ticket or not, he would give Bush's re-election prospects a huge boost if his trip results in eased tensions on the peninsula with a diplomatic compromise by Washington that Beijing and Tokyo could applaud.

And the vice president — as the administration's primo hard-liner — is just the man to do it. If there's one thing Cheney still offers the president, it's credibility with the ever-in-a-flutter world of U.S. hawks. In the time-honored fashion of conservative Nixon going to Red China to break bread, Cheney could bring back a North Korean breakthrough and pump life into Bush's international security record.

Tom Plate, whose column appears regularly in The Honolulu Advertiser, is a UCLA professor and founder of the nonprofit Asia Pacific Media Network. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu.