THE MALTA SUMMIT : New Trust Infusing U.S.-Soviet Relations : Diplomacy: ‘I think we have ended the Cold War,’ a Soviet official said after a recent meeting.

When Secretary of State James A. Baker III suggested to Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, that they hold their semiannual meeting not in Washington but in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Shevardnadze asked one of the “Americanologists” on his staff what Baker’s intention was.

“Wyoming?” the puzzled Shevardnadze asked. “Why Wyoming? What’s out there?”

“This is it--he’s inviting you home,” replied the adviser, who had worked in Washington. “This is the American way of saying, ‘We’re going to be friends.’ Let’s go to Wyoming.”

Shevardnadze agreed to travel to Jackson Hole, which had long been one of Baker’s favorite places. The two-day conference, preceded by a White House meeting with President Bush and three days of staff talks in Washington--and followed by a day of trout fishing--succeeded beyond the participants’ expectations.

“I have been in U.S.-Soviet meetings for more than 30 years, and we have never had rapport like that,” a senior U.S. diplomat said after the Wyoming talks. “To be sure, we have differences, serious differences on serious issues, but as we work to resolve them, there is a new spirit in the relationship.”

A Soviet official, returning from the mid-September meeting, commented: “The next 6 to 12 months will tell for sure, but I think we have ended the Cold War. Trust has replaced suspicion, and that’s key.”

Although cautious because of the depth of the problems and the overall complexity of Soviet-American relations, many other U.S. and Soviet specialists also see this new spirit--and more--coming out of the far-reaching changes within the Soviet Union and in its foreign policy.

“We have begun to think in terms of possibilities, creative opportunities, the potential for real peace, and our agenda is no longer just a list of obstacles,” a senior Washington-based U.S. official said on a visit to Moscow after the Jackson Hole meeting. “I would even say that we are challenging one another in ways that are starting to produce real breakthroughs on bilateral and international issues.”

Both countries are looking toward this weekend’s meeting between Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as an exploration of this new relationship.

“They will talk, they will raise issues, they will reflect upon their own philosophies. They will see where problems lie and, we hope, they will try to give a political impetus to the resolution of those problems and further improvement in relations,” Gennady I. Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s chief spokesman, said in Rome this week.

“Mostly, though, they will talk and lay the basis for what we believe will be much better relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, between East and West,” he added.

More than a progressive warming appears to be under way in this relationship between Moscow and Washington.

Shevardnadze was almost rhapsodic as he described the Jackson Hole meeting and the agreements reached there to the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature.

“There is understanding by both that conditions are ripe for a major new step forward,” Shevardnadze said. “Both the Soviet and American leaderships are guided by long-term prospects in the growing positive and constructive cooperation in bilateral relations and in the whole range of world problems.

“I must also point out that the Soviet-American dialogue has ascended to a new level of openness, businesslike attitudes, broadness of issues under discussion and degree of mutual understanding and good will,” Shevardnadze said.

Before the Jackson Hole meeting, Shevardnadze and other Soviet officials were openly worried that the Bush Administration, which had announced a “strategic review,” would slow or halt and perhaps even reverse the growing improvement that had come in relations between the two superpowers during the last years of the Reagan Administration.

“We greatly underestimated Ronald Reagan when he came to power,” Leonid I. Dobrokhotov, a foreign-policy specialist at the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee headquarters, said in an interview. “He called us an ‘evil empire,’ and he wanted to launch ‘Star Wars.’ But then came his embrace with Mikhail Gorbachev in Red Square.

“Ronald Reagan turned out to be a historic figure. He reflected a revolution in the American national consciousness that matched a revolution in our national consciousness under Mikhail Gorbachev.”

Even hard-bitten U.S. veterans of the Cold War are beginning to acknowledge the positive impact on Soviet-American relations of developments here and in Eastern Europe.

“These are people we can be friends with,” a U.S. diplomat, who prides himself on his no-nonsense realism, said after the Jackson Hole meeting. “There is no objective reason for us to be at loggerheads if they follow through on what they say their policies are.

“The problem in the past, over four decades, was the way in which they defined their national security interests, the way they forced their system on others, the way they threatened the United States and its allies. Here, we see changes, real changes.”

Andrei V. Nikiforov, editor of the influential Soviet journal USA, said, “Friendship is not certain, but the confrontation is ended.”

Eduard A. Shevardnadze, In the view of Nikiforov and other Soviet specialists on relations with the United States, Moscow and Washington are developing a new relationship in which they recognize that being nuclear superpowers does not make them enemies, that having different political and economic systems need not bring confrontation.

“Differences will continue on a lot of issues, but the ideological confrontation is over,” Nikiforov said in an interview. “That itself is a historic shift of immense importance for our two countries and for those around us.

“We now act, in fact, from the premise that we have common interests with the United States on many issues, that they converge on most others and in other instances they run in parallel. Individual problems remain from the era of confrontation, it is true, but they are not the obstacles they once were.”

For the Soviet Union, the new relationship with the United States is a result of what Moscow calls its “new political thinking,” a radically different approach to foreign relations and international issues that has come with glasnost and perestroika , Gorbachev’s programs of openness and reorganization.

“Some of the old-timers left at the Foreign Ministry wander up and down the halls, shaking their heads and mumbling to themselves about all the changes,” a ministry official said. “When an enemy becomes a partner, even a friend, it can be difficult to keep one’s bearings, but that must be true in the State Department and the Pentagon, too.

“What is changing is not just our relations with the United States or the West, but our whole understanding of the world, of our place in it, of our own country and of ourselves,” he said. “And I think that the United States--the foreign-policy Establishment, not the people--is probably pushed to keep up.”

Americans, by and large, are optimistic but still cautious about the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They believe that the changes should be encouraged but that the United States should be careful in reducing its defenses, according to a survey in mid-November by the Los Angeles Times Poll.

Two-thirds of those surveyed said Soviet foreign-policy goals have changed under Gorbachev, and a third thought they have changed quite radically. More than half said they believed that the Soviet Union “wants to live peacefully with the rest of the world,” although a third feared that Moscow still wants “to expand its power over other nations.”

A Times Poll four years ago found, by contrast, that half the American public agreed with President Ronald Reagan’s old characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

The Soviet Union feels itself pressed to prove that its new policies are firm and will not change, thereby strengthening the new relationship that it is seeking with the United States.

“We are becoming reliable partners because we have renounced many foreign-policy developments that happened in the past and proved wrong, that contradicted reality and the interests of the world community,” Yevgeny M. Primakov, a candidate member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo and chairman of one of the Supreme Soviet’s two chambers, said on his return from a recent tour of the United States. “We will not change, and we will continue our policy.”

This is an important issue. Both Moscow and Washington remember with regret how hopes were raised during the brief East-West detente of the early 1970s, only to be dashed as both new and old problems grew faster than they could be resolved in the new relationship.

What little remained of that rapprochement was crushed with the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan in December, 1979.

“We had thaws before, in the ‘50s, then in the ‘70s, but they lacked sufficient basis to make them irreversible,” foreign-policy expert Dobrokhotov said.

He explained:

“In the ‘70s, under Leonid Brezhnev, there was a certain renaissance of Stalinism in the Soviet Union--without all the horrors, but nevertheless Stalinism in our psychology, in internal politics and in such foreign actions as Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan and so forth. . . .

“We were trying in the 1970s to remove the foreign-policy link from the overall complex of our fundamental orientation, to be liberal in foreign policy while being Stalinist in all other things. That contributed to an inevitable collapse of what we called detente.”

A U.S. diplomat who was deeply involved in Soviet-American relations both here and in Washington during that period, as well as in the present improvement, agreed with Dobrokhotov’s assessment.

“We shared this delusion that we could do business without there being a real change in this society, this system,” he said. “We were anxious for peace, we wanted detente, we thought it could be done.

Eduard A. Shevardnadze, In “But there was not even a pretense at changing the system then. There was no internal change; in fact, there was even a tightening. And they said, quite openly, that the ideological struggle was to be intensified.

“Now, there is genuine change, and it is quite remarkable,” the diplomat added. “Their policies are changing, and these are not the superficial, tactical changes of the 1970s but something quite real.”

Those changes have already affected significantly the traditional elements of the “Soviet-American agenda”--arms control, human rights, regional conflicts, bilateral issues and global issues.

To get movement on arms-control issues, Gorbachev has been willing to concede to the United States what had been critical points for the Soviet Union in the hope that this would then be matched.

“Once you realize that true security lies in the overall relationship, the importance of this or that weapons system or this or that level of armament and manpower becomes much less important,” commented Andrei V. Kortunov, a foreign-policy specialist at the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada. “There has to be reciprocity, mutuality, a response if the momentum is to build, but we do not see single issues as decisive.”

Disarmament, once mostly a slogan, is the new focus of Soviet efforts on arms control, and progress on this issue will be the basic measure that Moscow uses to assess the overall relationship with Washington.

“Arms control is central,” Dobrokhotov said. “The change in our relationship should be reflected in reduced levels of armament, and disarmament should characterize our relations in the future. That will make further progress easier on other issues, too.”

With Gorbachev’s efforts to democratize the Soviet Union and a new commitment to protect civil liberties here, human rights as an element of the Soviet-American dialogue has changed greatly.

Instead of U.S. demands for free emigration, there are Soviet questions about Western willingness to accept the more than 15,000 people leaving each month.

“The whole character of the dialogue has changed,” a U.S. official who has followed human rights in the Soviet Union remarked. “We still ask about refuseniks because some people are still denied the right to emigrate, but they point out how many, many more are leaving, and ask, ‘Where are the visas?’

“We bring up those imprisoned on criminal charges for political reasons, but we sometimes have to admit that it’s largely a matter of perception. We ask about the incarceration of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals, and they invite us in to inspect and ask for our advice.”

There is a similar give-and-take on regional conflicts, several of which have been defused recently through U.S.-Soviet efforts. While Washington’s primary interest is Central America--and Bush has declared his intention to raise it with Gorbachev this weekend--Moscow puts its priority on Afghanistan, where anti-government rebels continue to receive U.S. aid.

The newest elements on the Soviet-American agenda are global issues that range from environmental protection to joint efforts to combat international terrorism. These elements reflect the willingness of Moscow and Washington to work together on issues that once were contentious or were approached from sharply different ideological perspectives.