Born during a midnight round of golf involving ex-US president Bill Clinton, a groundbreaking US-Singapore free trade pact, the first between Washington and an Asian state, comes of age at a White House signing ceremony Tuesday.

Joining President George W. Bush will be Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, Clinton's erstwhile partner in the floodlit dash around the links during an Asia-Pacific summit in Brunei in November 2000.

The ceremony will end two-and-a-half years of intricate negotiations and sometime frustration for Singapore, which watched as its number one foreign trade goal got short shrift as the Bush administration waged war on terrorists and set its trade priorities.

For the United States, the pact will be a stepping stone to a potential 500 million consumers in Southeast Asia and help spread Trade Representative Robert

Zoellick's gospel of bilateral trade pacts with favored US partners.

It views the treaty as a blueprint for other such pacts with partners in Asia and elsewhere, though some observers fear the tactic could detract from efforts to secure a new global free trade regime.

Singapore sees the free trade agreement (FTA) as a consummation of its strategy of acting as a bridge between the United States and Asia.

"US moves across the Pacific are very important in the grand design. Singapore is proud to be the first country in Asia in which the US has negotiated an FTA," George Yeo, Singapore's Trade and Industry Minister said in Washington last week.

The David-and-Goliath style treaty between Singapore, with a population of 4.2 million people and the world's most powerful economy will grant zero tarriff treatment to US exports to Singapore.

It will further open market

access for US service providers in the tiny yet rich republic's lucrative financial services industry, although Singapore fought and won the right to impose capital controls under extreme conditions.

The deal will promote new interaction between the two state's pharmaceutical, digital and textile industries, and harmonise customs procedures and intellectual property standards.

For Singapore, the pact also has strategic implications, in its perpetual struggle to balance relations with allies in Asia such as China, while developing relations with the United States.

Singapore, keenly aware that the stability on which its prosperity rests is threatened by the challenge of radical Islam in neighboring Indonesia and elsewhere, is concerned at the prospect of a prolonged faceoff between Washington and the Muslim world.

"It sends a message of hope to Muslims in Southeast Asia," said

Yeo, arguing the pact would raise living standards and prospects throughout the region and help to remove the conditions and disenfranchisement which nurture fundamentalism.

"The US Singapore FTA makes an impact on 20 per cent of the world Muslim population, which lives in Southeast Asia."

Legislation implementing The FTA must be submitted to Congress in the United States once it is signed.

Observers hope the pact, which enjoys strong bipartisan support to transit through the House of Representatives by the summer and to make it through the Senate by the fall.

US exports to Singapore totalled 18 billion dollars and two-way trade between the United States and its 11th largest export market reached 33 billion dollars in 2001. Total US investment in the country stands now at 23 billion dollars, according to the US-ASEAN Business Council.