Give Allies the Lead, but Hold Reins : Europe: If the United States need no longer be the Atlantic Alliance’s CEO, it must remain the chairman of the board.

The only thing worse than not consulting the Japanese, a government colleague of mine used to say, is consulting the Japanese. So it is with America’s allies in Europe. Too much leadership is bullying or high-handed; too little is weakness or indecision. Now is the time for the United States to let its European allies take the lead over Eastern Europe, but it is not the time for us to leave Europe to the Europeans. If the United States need no longer be the Atlantic Alliance’s CEO, it must remain the chairman of the board.

The reason is the center of Europe, the two Germanys. The underlying question is whether the nature of the state system in Europe has changed enough--or is in the process of doing so--so that old worries are no more. The postwar division, for all its unhappiness, did solve Europe’s historic problem. Dividing Germany and embedding the western half in NATO created, as the old saying had it, a Germany that was strong enough to stand up to the Soviet Union but not so strong as to threaten Luxembourg.

Such concerns may be old-fashioned. After all, the Federal Republic is a secure democracy now, and it is not as if Europeans have learned nothing from the last 40 years. The European Community, for all its shortcomings, is an impressive achievement in cooperation.

Yet in this century, Europe’s record at ordering its affairs when left alone is unimpressive, to put it gently. For all the euphoria over freedom’s march in Eastern Europe, there are more than a few echoes of the period between the wars. Now, as then, German influence--this time West Germany and primarily economic--is spreading through Eastern Europe. As the hand of the Soviet Union lightens there, old antagonisms are resurfacing, most notable that between Hungary and Romania.

Franco-German ties that exist now are a far cry from the period before World War II. Still, the Franco-German connection is weak and uneven, its ups and downs determined all too visibly by cycles of French concern over its neighbor.

More to the point, there is no strong Anglo-French understanding to serve as an anchor in the European Community for the Federal Republic. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has stubbornly pursued her own view of Europe, akin to that of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, as one of sovereign states, not of supranational institutions. Whatever the merits of her vision, it has taken Britain out of the game, leaving a vacuum at Europe’s center.

All politics is local politics, Tip O’Neill is credited with saying, and that seems true in spades for Mikhail S. Gorbachev. He seems so preoccupied with reform at home that he has little time for even those foreign relations that have been most critical to Moscow--Eastern Europe. Implicitly, he seems to be saying that he will deal with Eastern Europe, even perhaps Germany, later. He does have 400,000 Soviet soldiers in East Germany; while his spokesmen occasionally hint that Soviet troops might leave Hungary and Poland, East Germany is never on the list.

The continuing stream of East Germans fleeing their county is a reminder of just how unpredictable the future will be and how fast that future may arrive. The best of America’s experts on East Germany, who are dismayingly few in any case, were badly wrong about the events of this summer and fall; a year ago they were talking of East Germany’s “success.” That East Germans--Prussians, after all--would be satisfied because their standard of living was better than Poland’s seems laughable in retrospect. It should at least make for humility and an awareness that whatever designs we conceive will be badly wrong.

Yet that is no excuse for not thinking ahead, still less for leaving it all to the Europeans. When President Bush meets with Gorbachev, reassuring him that the West has no designs on Eastern Europe is important. But reassurance and listening so “not to miss anything,” as the President put it, are not enough.

He needs also to indicate America’s willingness to stay in Europe, with military forces, for some time to come. He needs to stress that our primary goal in Eastern Europe is political and economic change--”Finlandization,” though he would not put it that way--not dismantling the military alliances. That can come later, if at all. So, too, while the United States cannot be in the position of preventing its German ally from achieving its dreams about countrymen to the east, the President also needs to be plain that the questions at issue are not ones for Germans alone. Other Europeans have large stakes. And so does the transatlantic chairman of the board.