NEWS ANALYSIS : Cheney Emerging as Foe of ‘Gorbymania’ : Foreign Policy: He takes the spotlight in Europe with forceful warnings on firmness toward the Soviets.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, on a nine-day visit to Western Europe, left his trademark cowboy boots in a suitcase, except for two visits to U.S. troops.

But when the talk turned to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as it did from London to West Berlin as Cheney called on defense ministers of the Western Alliance, there was no mistaking this plain-speaking Wyoming conservative, even in his tasseled shoes.

For most of the nine months he has served as defense secretary, Dick Cheney has been the quiet figure in the Bush Administration’s inner circle of foreign policy advisers.

With much of his time consumed by the daunting tasks of reforming Pentagon management, plotting the military’s war on drugs, and fighting budget battles on Capitol Hill, Cheney has played a largely behind-the-scenes role in helping shape East-West relations, leaving the speaking to Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

But by the end of his first European tour as defense secretary, Dick Cheney was at the center of the East-West policy stage.

In four European capitals, in West Berlin and at a meeting of his colleagues in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Cheney took the lead in shoring up Western defenses against “Gorbymania,” the euphoric hope that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will transform his country and its East Bloc allies into militarily unthreatening democracies.

At every stop, Cheney invoked what has become the Bush Administration’s trinity of sentiments toward Soviet and East European reform efforts: hope, optimism and caution. While hope and optimism appear to be the provinces of the President and Baker, caution is clearly Cheney’s department, and it was this position that Cheney went to Europe prepared to defend.

“The emphasis is on two different parts of the problem,” Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said. “The United States has got to negotiate with the Soviets, and we’ve got to hope that reforms work. But in the meantime, we have to keep up our guard. Cheney’s the guy that’s in charge of the meantime.”

Cheney tirelessly reminded his NATO counterparts that they must hold the line against premature Western concessions. And, as his trip wound down, he told reporters Monday that his colleagues, many of them new to their jobs, were grateful.

Other senior officials said that an American defense secretary’s forceful words of caution would help NATO defense ministers make their case at home against military cuts.

“I think most of them believe it,” Cheney said. “That’s our responsibility. We’re not charged with negotiating agreements with the East. We’re charged with maintaining our defenses.”

His new leadership in NATO’s East-West debate has transformed the normally self-effacing Cheney into a feisty defender of U.S. policy and NATO strategy.

Repeating a theme invoked often on the trip, Cheney told the reporters: “It’s worked. It’s been the most successful alliance in history. It has been the longest period of peace in Europe in 2,000 years, courtesy of the United States government and our military commitments.”

Cheney was similarly assertive in West Berlin, when Mayor Walter Momper, a Social Democrat, called for NATO to adopt a “structurally defensive defense” strategy. This is shorthand for stripping NATO of its ability to threaten counterattacks on the Warsaw Pact, and the Pentagon firmly opposes any such move.

Cheney minced no words in correcting what he perceived as Momper’s wrong-headedness, insisting that NATO’s doctrine has always been defensive.

Momper “has been a gracious host,” Cheney said, but “we may not see eye-to-eye on individual matters of politics and policy.”

Cheney seemed to relish his new role as the alliance’s primus inter pares and the Bush Administration’s chief antidote to “Gorbymania.”

In Rome on Monday, Italian President Francesco Cossiga asked Cheney if he were not the youngest of NATO’s defense ministers. Cheney, who is 48, put off the question, responding simply that he was by no means the newest of defense ministers.

“I enjoy saying what I think whenever it is reasonable and responsible to do so, and I think there are a lot of other people that should as well,” Cheney said later.

His plain-spoken manner won him some friends.

His first stop turned up a kindred spirit in the French defense minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement. On Oct. 23, Chevenement, after meeting with Cheney for the first time, said the two had discussed the necessity of being “vigilant, as befits someone in the position of defense minister.”

Cheney, a man not given to effusion, called the meeting “the most useful I’ve had since becoming defense secretary.”

But the French have their own reasons for siding with Cheney’s hawkish views toward the Soviet promise of change. They are deeply wary of Soviet proposals to monitor reductions in conventional arms, fearing that Soviet inspectors will collect industrial secrets as well. They are traditionally prickly about French sovereignty, and they do not want their independent nuclear force de frappe subjected to superpower negotiations.

By contrast, in other countries of Western Europe, disputes over how to respond to Gorbachev’s entreaties were just beneath the surface. And Cheney, appealing for alliance unity in the face of East Bloc instability, kept them there.

Whether Cheney’s plain talk or genuine alliance jitters worked that charm, the fact remains that NATO ministers appeared eager to defer consideration of potentially divisive issues until Gorbachev has had more time. For the moment, at least, Cheney appeared to have enforced order, and he seemed pleased with the achievement.

“NATO is as important as it has been for the past 40 years, and may be even more important in the years to come,” he said at the conclusion of a meeting of the NATO Nuclear Planning Group. “It’s important that we retain our purposefulness.”

Thus, defense ministers meeting in Portugal all pointed to a May decision not to discuss the modernization of NATO’s short-range nuclear weapons before 1992. They waved off as premature questions about how the alliance will divide up negotiated cuts in conventional forces. They refused to discuss the terms on which NATO might negotiate reductions in short-range nuclear weapons before the reductions in non-nuclear forces are under way.

U.S. officials said that with new Soviet arms proposals coming almost daily, a rising tide of “Gorbymania” could wash away Cheney’s efforts, as defense ministers energized by his pleas could find themselves politically isolated. But according to Cheney, the tide appears already to have peaked.

“I don’t sense that there is quite as much euphoria as there was earlier,” he said, adding that European officials, recognizing the magnitude of the problems they are dealing with, have added “a few more qualifiers” to their assessments.