ANALYSIS : U.S. Seen Taking a Lesser Role as East Bloc Changes

A gap has developed between the United States and its European allies about the importance of fast-moving changes in East Europe and how to react to them.

Europeans argue that on such vital issues as growing instability in the Soviet Empire, the flowering of democracy in Poland and Hungary, and pressure for closeness between the two Germanys, the U.S. response has been characterized by sometimes contradictory voices.

The gap is perceived as one of differing priorities, with President Bush seen as downgrading the importance of events that require urgent, farsighted action, while Europeans believe that these events will lead to a political restructuring of the continent.

Francois Heisbourg, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, says the Bush Administration’s focus on such foreign policy aims as ousting Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega has diminished the U.S. effort in more strategic areas such as Europe.

“I think Europeans understand the importance of America’s back yard to Americans, but that the trivia in Panama can take up so much of the Administration’s time and energy raises questions about the way political institutions (in Washington) operate,” Heisbourg said the other day.

There is also a sense that this gap reflects a far deeper change: The beginning of America’s inevitable retreat from Europe, a retreat made possible by a diminished Soviet threat but caused mainly by American economic fatigue and a lack of political will to rectify huge trade and budget deficits.

“That may be the strongest force leading to a retreat from international responsibilities,” Heisbourg said. “If the U.S. can’t back up its policies with money, then it can’t act even if it wants to. You can talk of credits to Poland, but you have to have the credits to give before you offer them.”

Whatever the causes, the United States appears strangely detached from a debate that many believe will determine the future of Europe.

This is the first time since the Allied landings in Normandy 45 years ago that the United States has taken a back-seat in such a major European development.

“The Americans are at a loss,” said Dominique Moisi, associate director of the French Institute of International Relations. “They are at an intermediate stage of not knowing what their role is.”

The absence of a well-defined U.S. lead has left the Western Alliance with no strong collective voice and little clear direction.

“We should be defining the changes in the East and what the West needs to do in response,” said Edward Streator, former deputy permanent representative of the United States to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a political analyst here in London. “There’s a need to prepare the allies in the exercise of rethinking the military strategy and economic imperatives arising from these changes.”

Two recent speeches by Secretary of State James A. Baker III, endorsing the Soviet reform process and outlining the Administration’s basis for a new relationship with Moscow, are judged in Europe as welcome clarifications of U.S. policy, but because of their belated timing as symptomatic of a government that has trailed rather than led in the reaction to events.

The most striking measure of the gulf between the United States and its European allies is the contrast in mood across the Atlantic. There is little feeling of triumph among America’s allies as communism crumbles in East Europe, only a sense of brief opportunity, of a fleeting moment when anything may be possible if swift and clear action is taken.

As Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger speaks with nostalgia of simpler Cold War certainties, Europe is electric with anticipation; as American academics postulate theories about the end of a historic period, Europeans sense a new and uncertain dawn; as Bush urges caution in dispensing aid to Poland and Hungary, his European counterparts talk of urgency in providing aid on the scope of a Marshall Plan for the East Bloc.

Especially, they urge swift, substantive help to rescue a fragile democratic government in Poland, teetering on the brink of insolvency and struggling to survive amid economic chaos and declining membership in Solidarity, the free trade union movement that led the fight for representative government. For them, Poland is the bellwether of all East Europe.

“Solidarity’s failure would reverberate throughout the bloc,” said Hans Binnendijk, a colleague of Heisbourg’s at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It would be a huge opportunity lost.”

Last month, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote privately to Western leaders urging more and faster help for Poland, Bush was reportedly resisting congressional pressure to increase the Administration’s proposal of $50 million in emergency U.S. food supplies.

“It is absolutely vital politically that Poland succeeds, absolutely vital,” Thatcher told a group of American reporters earlier this month.

For once, Thatcher seemed to speak for the majority of Europeans.

West Germany is reportedly preparing a $1.5-billion economic assistance package for Poland, nearly twice the $838 million approved last week by the House and four times the amount proposed by Bush.

There is little doubt among Europeans about the depth of the changes unfolding. Among those changes:

-- In Hungary, the government recently ended the Communist Party’s leading role in state affairs, dismantling the red star that had shone over Parliament for 40 years as a symbol of Communist primacy, and for the first time sanctioned open celebration of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising.

-- In East Germany, unprecedented street demonstrations have shaken what were widely seen as the most secure, successful managers of any Stalinist system. Party chief Erich Honecker’s swift departure has made it clear that the crisis of communism is as much political as economic.

-- In Poland, life has been turned upside down. Communist-led unions demonstrate against a Solidarity-led government; Solidarity leader Lech Walesa speaks wistfully of a bygone era when he could rest and gather his strength in jail, and in advance of a Warsaw Pact meeting this week, the Polish hosts pondered whether the word comrade was still appropriate.

Elsewhere, authorities in the Soviet republic of Estonia talk of issuing a parallel currency for use along with the ruble; 5,000 Soviet tanks roll out of East Bloc countries and back into the Soviet Union, and the works of Milovan Djilas, an outspoken Yugoslav critic of Soviet-style communism, may soon be published in Moscow.

The low-key Administration response to these developments has added to the overall feeling of change on a continent dominated for nearly two generations by the superpowers.

To some extent, West Europeans see opportunity in this. Many welcome a more thoughtful U.S. President who, in the words of a senior West German official, “doesn’t immediately start telling the world how to do things.”

The French Institute’s Moisi, who recently returned from Washington, used the terms “very professional” and “competent” to describe the Bush Administration. But he said the word that best characterizes it is “perplexed.”

The French tend to fret about dealing, with less U.S. help, with West Germany’s disproportionate strength and its lure eastward. Other Europeans worry that NATO, without strong leadership, could have a serious problem dividing the fruits of an expected conventional arms agreement in Vienna.

For the United States too, continued inaction is likely to carry a price, analysts here believe.

“To the extent that we don’t fulfill a leadership role, we handicap ourselves in the long term, and we’re certainly not playing a leading role now,” Streator, the American analyst in London, said.

As the pace of the change accelerates around them, West Europeans have begun to contemplate life without the United States. Increasingly, they talk about the 12-member European Community, not NATO, as West Germany’s anchor to the West and as the framework for an eventual reconciliation of the two Germanys.

“We’re lucky that the European Community has reached the stage where it can be seen as a viable alternative,” Oxford historian Robert O’Neill said.

O’Neill is among those who believe that West Europe’s maturity as a more unified political entity can succeed only if Europe is supported by a continued U.S. military presense for at least another decade.

Events have also generated a new urgency in Brussels to speed the fragile unifying process among the EC’s 12 member states in order to provide a potential focal point for newly democratic East European countries.

“History does not wait,” Jacques Delors, president of the EC Executive Commission, warned last week. “Faced with the tremendous shock waves which are shaking the world, and in particular the other Europe, it is essential that the Community reinforce its cohesion. . . .”

French President Francois Mitterrand echoed these sentiments Wednesday in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

In light of all these developments, West Europeans see what they regard as a truism: The transatlantic relationship has been sustained above all by a common Soviet threat, and once this threat recedes, so too will U.S. influence in Europe.

“With a diminished Soviet threat, there is going to be less American influence,” Moisi said. “The terms of the equation that linked the U.S. and Europe for so long have gone.”