NEWS ANALYSIS : Alliances May Turn From War to Politics : Europe: For NATO and the Warsaw Pact, demilitarization, not demolition, appears to be the goal.

BRUSSELS--In the “new era of Europe” proclaimed after the Malta summit conference, the United States and the Soviet Union find themselves supporting the continued existence of the two most visible institutional symbols of Cold War hostility--the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact.

As they struggle to keep their footing on the rapidly shifting topography of Europe, the superpowers have come to see the once-threatening alliances as valuable to the larger interests of both.

Demilitarization of the alliances, not their demolition, now appears to be the goal of both sides.

This dramatic, and ironic, shift has taken place because both have begun to see the two organizations as potentially valuable instruments for helping to keep the peace within the two blocs and managing the force reductions to which both are committed.

Here at NATO headquarters, where President Bush reported Monday on his talks with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a small but telling change in terminology has already occurred.

“We no longer use the phrase ‘Warsaw Pact,’ a senior NATO official said. “Too pejorative, too military,” he said. “We now speak of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, a more sober, more political organization.

“We can see WTO in the future performing the same functions as NATO as it becomes de-ideologized and more egalitarian. It will be useful not so much in reassuring Soviet concerns for their security from the West but in ensuring against destabilizing events in East Europe and in policing arms reduction agreements.”

Gorbachev has also changed terminology, dropping the longstanding propagandistic Soviet call for “dismantling military blocs.” Instead, he openly urged that the two blocs be politicized.

“NATO and the Warsaw Pact,” he said Sunday, “should not remain military alliances, but rather military-political alliances and, later on, just political alliances. Their nature would change in accordance with the changes on the Continent.”

Bush strongly supported an increase in the political functions of NATO, although details of how this would be done have not been spelled out.

He told the alliance meeting here that “NATO should promote human rights, democracy and reform within Eastern countries.”

Asked about Gorbachev’s call for transforming the alliances and whether he could envision cooperation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the President implicitly accepted the continued existence of both alliances.

He said he could see “economic interaction” between the blocs. Gorbachev, he said, had not pressed the issue of transforming the alliances, although the Soviet president accepted “an active U.S. presence in Europe, one way or another,” for the foreseeable future.

NATO, many analysts agree, is more important to the United States in maintaining its political leverage in Europe than the Warsaw Pact is to the Soviet Union.

As NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner said Sunday: “NATO is the only transatlantic forum where the concerns of Western Europe can be considered. . . . It’s the only real platform you have between North America and Europe.”

And if that is true for Europe, it is equally true for the United States.

Neither the United States nor Canada is a member of the European Community, and they can make their voices on economic integration and the growing political cooperation among West European nations heard primarily through NATO and through their military contributions to the defense of the Continent.

Thus, when Bush was asked why there will always have to be a NATO, he said that in some utopian day 100 years from now, “there might not be, but that day hasn’t arrived.”

Not all NATO members are as enthusiastic as Bush and Woerner about the organization taking a greater political role, the senior NATO official conceded.

But even the “waverers,” he said, recognize that “it is hard to see how East Europe integration, arms control and the reunification of Germany can be handled without a more political role for NATO.”

“My view,” he said, “is that as we move from military confrontation toward a future that is not war-less but a future in which war is less likely, we would prevent war not by military means but by joint management of the peace by NATO and the WTO.”