NEWS ANALYSIS : THE MALTA SUMMIT : A New Era Is Ushered in by Superpowers

President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed no treaties and reached no major new agreements. But in eight hours of summit talks this weekend, the two leaders etched a mark in history nonetheless:

They took their first concrete steps toward a new relationship between the world’s nuclear superpowers and an end to the 40-year confrontation of the Cold War.

By setting an ambitious, one-year timetable for the conclusion of two major arms agreements and approving joint projects in a range of other areas--from fighting international terrorism to rebuilding the Soviet economy--Bush and Gorbachev took specific steps that, while modest in themselves, gave all their dealings a new, more positive tone.

“We stand on the threshold of a brand new era of U.S.-Soviet relations,” Bush said at the close of the summit.

Neither leader was quite ready to declare the Cold War officially over, and both noted that serious disputes between the superpowers may long remain.

“The world leaves one epoch of Cold War and enters another epoch,” Gorbachev said, but added: “We’re just at the very beginning of our road--long road--to a long-lasting peaceful period.”

“We have not solved all the problems that exist between the United States and the Soviet Union,” Bush said. “But (the summit was) a major step toward understanding and toward trying to tear down any remaining barriers that shot up because of the Cold War.”

Perhaps more important than any of their specific actions, Bush and Gorbachev achieved a new tone of understanding in a personal relationship that, for most of the past year, has been a wary standoff.

Gorbachev, whose aides have been publicly scolding the United States for moving too slowly on arms-control issues, went so far in Malta as to endorse Bush’s watchword of “caution” in foreign policy--although, to some, his tone seemed a bit puckish.

“In our position, the most dangerous thing is to exaggerate,” he said. “We should always preserve elements of caution--and here I am using the favorite word of President Bush.”

The Soviet leader has not always been so charitable. Last December, at the final summit meeting between Gorbachev and then-President Ronald Reagan, the Soviet leader abruptly confronted then-Vice President Bush, demanding to know whether he was serious about improving U.S.-Soviet relations.

And last spring, the two governments exchanged a series of prickly messages. A White House spokesman even derided Gorbachev as a “drugstore cowboy” for what Bush saw as Soviet grandstanding before world public opinion.

“Six months ago, there was probably a misunderstanding on his part about the intentions of this new President,” Bush said Sunday. Now, after the summit, the President said, “I don’t think he has me down as a total negativist at all.”

Indeed, that was one of Bush’s hidden agenda items at Malta--convincing Gorbachev, and the rest of the world, that he is serious about helping perestroika , the Soviet leader’s policy of political and economic restructuring, to succeed.

To do that, the President gave Gorbachev some movement on the two issues that concerned the Soviets most: arms control and economic assistance.

For months, Soviet officials have complained that the Administration was stalling on the remaining issues in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, which aim at cutting the superpowers’ offensive ballistic missiles by as much as 50%. Indeed, as the Malta summit opened, Soviet officials told reporters here that Gorbachev planned to demand a timetable for completing START from Bush. The President, apparently anticipating such a gambit, moved first, proposing such a timetable.

In economics, Bush offered the Soviet leader a package of U.S. actions that were relatively modest but that included two that Gorbachev had specifically sought: quick action toward granting most-favored-nation status to Soviet imports and sponsorship of observer status for the Soviet Union in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Western trade coordinating group.

Gorbachev praised Bush’s offers on this score, saying they provided “a political impetus--which had been lacking--for our economic cooperation to gain momentum.”

For his part, the Soviet leader contributed to the summit’s success by coming to Malta with none of his trademark surprises. Some Administration officials had feared--and publicly warned--that Gorbachev might upstage Bush with another spectacular arms control proposal.

Even in their discussion of Central America, by all accounts the most contentious issue at the meeting, there was evidence of progress. The two leaders disagreed bluntly over whether Nicaragua should be held responsible for clandestine arms shipments to the leftist rebels in El Salvador, but the argument was “without rancor and without hostility,” Bush noted.

That is no small change in a relationship that, in four decades of chill, has experienced more than its share of walkouts and table-pounding.

“I remember a time when I first met Mr. Gorbachev,” Bush said, “and we talked about human rights, and he became visibly agitated with me for raising it. And I think there’s been a great evolution. . . . You get the feeling he really wants to work with us.”

“This is a real mark of the normalization of the relationship,” a senior Bush aide added, “the fact that we can now disagree on issues without the disagreements becoming disruptive.”

In all the general goodwill, several longstanding landmarks of the Cold War were discarded almost in passing, like outmoded machinery from an earlier age.

On Central America, for example, Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III said they accepted the Soviets’ denials of responsibility for the Salvadoran guerrillas, dropping an argument that was once an article of faith in the Reagan Administration. Similarly, in the Middle East, the Americans who once struggled to keep the Soviets out of the game, now praised their “constructive role.”

Bush made a special point of saying that Gorbachev’s laissez-faire policy in Eastern Europe “certainly lays to rest previous doctrines that may have had a different approach”--publicly accepting for the first time the sincerity of Moscow’s abandonment of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine of Soviet intervention.