Flexibility for Conventional Cuts : Europe: East and West are recognizing the importance of keeping military issues from interfering with political change, or new security arrangements.

The bonhomie of the Malta meeting between George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev underscored one key development of the new detente: Confrontation between the Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact has effectively come to an end. But that fact also contains an imperative to close the gap between decisive political change and the persistence of the old military structures.

Most striking, the Warsaw Pact has ceased to be a viable military alliance, although nearly 400,000 Soviet troops remain in East Germany. Lines of communication between the Soviet Union and Germany are no longer guaranteed, and the pact’s political basis has collapsed.

By contrast, NATO’s political cohesion sustains its military capacities. But its doctrines are being hollowed out. Most obviously, the role of nuclear arms in NATO strategy is under challenge. As recently as last May, for example, the United States and Britain were pressing West Germany to accept deployment of a new short-range nuclear missile. But when the Berlin Wall opened, that became impossible. No government in Bonn can agree to target democratic countries, actual and incipient, with nuclear weapons. Indeed, it would probably accede to a renewed Soviet proposal to denuclearize both Germanys.

The nuclear element in Western strategy will not, in fact, be abandoned anytime soon. But from now on there will be little willingness within the alliance to deal with any of the requirements of making credible NATO’s doctrine of “flexible response”--the process of escalating, if need be, to nuclear war.

Two other changes must also be recognized. Efforts to rationalize and modernize NATO defenses will proceed at a much slower pace, if at all. And U.S. efforts to get the Europeans to assume a greater share of the common defense burden will now fall on ears even less willing to hear. Indeed, now that the United States is committed to making significant cuts in its forces deployed in Europe, the debate will shift to a competition among the allies to benefit from any reductions agreed at the Vienna talks on conventional forces.

Given these pressures, President Bush is wise to press for an early conclusion of the conventional force talks. An agreement would also begin getting Soviet troops out of Eastern Europe, where their presence still poses a latent threat to the West and is a potentially explosive factor in a region ablaze with democratic revolution.

But as now designed, the Vienna talks are deficient. When convened, they were predicated on the need to regulate the potential for conflict. Because distrust formed the political background, great emphasis has been put on elaborate mechanisms for ensuring that everyone’s interests are protected. Following an agreement, these new military arrangements would be frozen in time and space. So, presumably, would be East-West politics.

In recent weeks, however, the states of East and West have begun to realize that they share a new set of interests that are not based on confrontation but on common security. They are coming to recognize the importance of keeping military issues from interfering with political change, or from later on inhibiting the development of new security arrangements embracing the entire Continent.

Ideally, therefore, the Vienna talks should not be directed toward creating an inflexible agreement but rather toward helping both alliances coordinate mutual, unilateral reductions in troops and weapons. This method would dispense with elaborate zones and ceilings on forces that impose unwanted rigidities--especially, in the West, on the U.S. presence on the Continent. Each alliance could structure its remaining forces as it saw fit--mindful that the other alliance would not continue its own cuts unless the process were satisfactory. Most important, there would be no new and cumbersome military arrangements in the way of the eventual creation of an all-European security system.

Even this more flexible approach to reducing conventional forces in Europe would not answer the most critical question: How to proceed with the politics of unifying both Europe and Germany while security is based on opposing military machines. One Germany cannot be in two alliances or be neutral between them so long as they form the basis of European security. Nor can it belong to NATO, as President Bush has asserted. Thus the job of both devising and developing an alternative for European security--from the Atlantic to the Urals--cannot be postponed. It must begin now, before either “history in the streets” or political strife between West Germany and its neighbors over unification clashes with the remnants of East-West military confrontation.