NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush Faces Tough New Challenges : Must Meet Expectations of Europe Triumph, Experts Say

When George Bush left for Europe a little more than a week ago, he was besieged by critics for failing to meet the challenges of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. At home, Democrats derided him as ineffective. Abroad, the allies fretted over a vacuum in NATO leadership. Even the usually civil British Broadcasting Corp. referred to Bush as “President Dither.”

On Friday, the President returned in triumph after a virtuoso performance at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit. He was “President Dither” no more. Yet his success in Europe, far from offering a respite from the world’s demands for bold diplomacy, actually sets up a new series of challenges for the United States and the West.

And these new challenges go beyond the welter of technical and other problems associated with the details of his dramatic proposals on arms control.

“The President lucked out, in a way,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department counselor. “He ended the period of what looked like a directionless policy just in time. . . . But there are still a lot of difficult issues to solve.

“There are fundamental questions (of Western strategy) that are forcing their way to the top of the agenda,” Sonnenfeldt said.

After months of insisting that the United States should not get onto the public-relations playing field with Gorbachev, the President turned his critics into cheerleaders by doing just that, with a carefully designed arms control proposal that won worldwide praise.

But that may have been the easy part. The challenge now, officials and experts say, is to keep pressure on the Soviet Union to respond to the West’s agenda while satisfying rising public expectations for progress in East-West relations.

Failure to meet those soaring expectations would be to risk a fall as meteoric as this week’s rise, these analysts say.

At the NATO summit in Brussels, Bush offered a new Western proposal for negotiations to shrink the armies that face each other across Europe’s Iron Curtain, including a cut of 30,000 U.S. troops on the continent. And, he said, he hoped to see results within 12 months.

That initiative enabled the Atlantic Alliance to reach a compromise on short-range nuclear missiles, which West Germany wants to reduce over resistance from Britain and the United States.

The President’s success on both issues reinvigorated the alliance, which has been searching for a new definition of its purpose in the face of Gorbachev’s bold acts to reduce the apparent Soviet threat to the West.

But what it left for Bush, now the acknowledged leader of the West, to deal with were:

- The deadline pressures, perhaps even greater on Washington than on Moscow, to meet Bush’s call for a pact on conventional forces in the astonishingly short time of 12 months. The timetable was designed to put pressure on Gorbachev to bring his forces down to Western levels--but the deadline appears almost impossible to make.

“No one should discount the complexity of the negotiations to follow,” Defense Secretary Dick Cheney warned. And the gambit could backfire: “Usually, when you put any kind of implicit deadlines on a negotiation, you end up putting more pressure on the United States than you do on the adversary,” said Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

* Political pressures likely to be generated in the United States and in several NATO countries to cut back their own forces whether or not the Soviet Union does likewise. Bush’s proposal to withdraw 30,000 U.S. troops from Europe, while a relatively modest move, may set off a rush of sentiment for cutbacks by individual NATO countries that could outpace the negotiations with Moscow.

“This is not the summit, this is base camp one,” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), a leading proponent of troop withdrawals.

“It’s going to be a problem in Europe,” added Sonnenfeldt. “The allies have budget pressures and domestic pressures too.”

* An inevitable resurgence of European sentiment for immediate negotiations with the Soviets on the divisive issue of short-range nuclear missiles. By the end of this week, NATO’s compromise over short-range nuclear weapons was already a bit frayed at the edges. West Germany’s opposition parties renewed their demands for immediate negotiations to reduce short-range missiles (which NATO rejected, opting instead to endorse negotiations only after the Soviet Bloc shrinks its conventional forces).

And Bonn’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, has already suggested that the alliance’s commitment to maintain some short-range nuclear missiles--a critical point to the Bush Administration--might not last forever.

* Some long-term questions of NATO strategy which, not surprisingly, were left up in the air by the summit. As pressure continues to reduce both conventional forces and battlefield nuclear weapons, how will the alliance continue to meet its most basic mission, to deter the threat of attack from the East?

“The combination of German uneasiness about the existing strategy, especially its reliance on short-range nuclear forces, and the perception of a declining threat means that this debate is certainly going to continue,” Sonnenfeldt said.

* The Administration’s continuing “Gorbachev problem,” which was momentarily ameliorated, but not eliminated, by Bush’s tour de force at the NATO summit. The Soviet leader is scheduled to visit West Germany beginning June 12, and officials expect him at the very least to renew his call for the elimination of battlefield nuclear weapons--if he does not go farther and pull off yet another public relations coup of his own.

Recognizing that possibility, the Bush Administration hopes to keep the pressure on Gorbachev by maintaining the public focus on issues on which the West holds the advantage: conventional armed forces, where NATO’s new proposal challenges the Soviet Union to make much deeper cuts than the Kremlin has offered; the political and economic success of the West, as compared to the Soviet Bloc, and new opportunities for interaction with Eastern Europe, where Moscow has allowed more autonomy and pluralism than ever before.

NATO has always been a political alliance as well as a military pact, but the organization crossed a watershed at the summit: For the first time, it placed greater emphasis on its political potential. The final communique, for example, said security is enhanced not only with military defenses but also with political negotiations toward new arms control agreements.

The new NATO agenda also accepted Bush’s new policy toward the Soviet Union, called “beyond containment,” as well as its implicit call for a “rollback” of communism in Eastern Europe. “We’re very careful not to use that phrase, ‘rollback,’ ” said a senior U.S. official, recalling that the Cold War policy of pushing the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe was never successfully put into effect. A senior NATO official added: “We prefer to think of East Europe being sucked back into Western Europe.”

Nevertheless, Eastern Europe is likely to become the next major battleground for the Administration’s diplomacy, beginning with Bush’s scheduled visits to Poland and Hungary next month.

Officials said they are working on a set of options for the President to announce as part of a new U.S. economic and political opening to those countries, the most liberal in the area; the NATO communique mentioned such moves as student exchanges, technology assistance and even management training for budding capitalists. The measures also would be offered to other countries in the Soviet Bloc, as “incentives” for them to institute reforms too, one official said.

Paradoxically, the Administration’s new ideas about Eastern Europe have already drawn some complaints from West Germany, the same country that worried most about Bush’s lack of imagination on arms control. A senior West German official privately told U.S. officials this week that his government favors “more caution” in approaching the Soviet Bloc, to reassure the Kremlin that the West is not seeking to change Europe’s political map too abruptly.

Over the long run, the strains between Bonn and the rest of the alliance appear likely to persist. All three nuclear powers in NATO--the United States, Britain and France--were strongly opposed to Genscher’s demands for early negotiations to remove short-range nuclear forces from German soil.

The lesson of the week within the Bush White House may be that the sometimes ungainly Administration can act decisively and effectively, provided it bypasses its own bureaucracy.

As Administration officials tell the tale, Bush’s arms control proposal had been under consideration in general terms for many months but was hammered into specifics rapidly, by a small circle of trusted aides.

Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft had set up a two-track system in foreign policy, they said. The first track was a set of formal policy reviews undertaken by the existing bureaucracy, to assess “what the state of the world is now, how it has changed, where we want to see it going,” one aide said. That produced the somewhat dispiriting conclusion that the Administration should essentially continue with the policies in place, an approach that was dubbed “status quo plus.”

The second track--less formal, but ultimately more important--was a small group of aides charged by Scowcroft and Secretary of State James A. Baker III with developing proposals for new policies that Bush could present. The small group, which included Scowcroft’s deputy, Robert M. Gates, along with Baker aides Dennis Ross and Robert B. Zoellick and Undersecretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, was intended to produce new and specific ideas--and to keep them from leaking into the press.

“New ideas are going to come from this staff, not from the bureaucracy,” an official recalled Scowcroft saying at a staff meeting in March.

The “turning point,” an official said, came May 19, when the key members of the small group met with Bush at his seaside retreat in Maine. They reviewed the new proposals--which by that time had been “scrubbed” by the Joint Chiefs of Staff--and Bush dispatched two aides to Europe to brief key allied leaders.

Bush’s evident satisfaction at the outcome suggests that he may resort to that approach again when his policies need a boost.

“Whatever the political arrows might have been fired my way,” he told a reporter in response to a question about the earlier criticism of his policies, “it’s all been worth it, because I think we have something sound and solid to build on now.”

Times staff writers Melissa Healy and David Lauter contributed to this article.