COMBAT IN PANAMA : Political Changes Abroad Creating Heavy Demands for U.S. Aid : Budget: Officials see appeals from Panama and Eastern Europe competing with other deficit burdens.

Just as a domestic budget squeeze tightens in the United States, the sudden political changes in Panama and Eastern Europe are unleashing appeals for sharply increased U.S. foreign aid--appeals that the United States may not be able to satisfy.

“The democratization of Eastern Europe is welcome politically, of course, but it’s a very disastrous situation from a budgetary viewpoint,” said a key Administration strategist who has been keeping tabs on the problem. “There’s a serious question of how you manage it all.”

Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Congress will be more willing to vote aid to Panama, now that U.S. forces have deposed Manuel A. Noriega as that country’s dictator.

But, McCurdy fretted, “put this on top of aid to Poland and Hungary and the Philippines and El Salvador and environmental restoration and drug interdiction and the savings and loan associations, and that is a heck of a burden.”

Although the amounts proposed for individual countries are relatively small, the overall increase--which easily could amount to between $1 billion and $2 billion a year--will intensify frictions between the White House and Congress.

The increased demand comes as the White House is preparing to submit to Congress its fiscal 1991 budget, which it has already squeezed substantially to reach the target specified by the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law.

As a result, a growing number of lawmakers are beginning to question whether President Bush will be able to keep his campaign promise to avoid a tax boost. “I wonder if he is going be able to get away with saying ‘Read my lips’ much longer,” McCurdy said.

In broad policy terms, there is little doubt that the United States can afford the extra money. Even a $2-billion increase is not very much in a $1.2-trillion budget.

Charles L. Schultze, a Brookings Institution economist, noted that U.S. spending for the Marshall Plan, which helped restore European economies during the four years just after World War II, amounted to 4.7% of this country’s total output--the equivalent of $240 billion today, or $60 billion a year.

Also, Alan J. Stoga, economic analyst for Kissinger Associates of New York, pointed out that, while the United States footed the Marshall Plan bill alone, today’s aid to Eastern Europe is being financed “primarily by the Germans, the French, the Italians and the British.”

“The United States is contributing only a small part,” he asserted.

What is more, some analysts here are expecting Washington to reap a massive “peace dividend” from sharply reduced defense spending as tensions between the West and East subside. The newly available money could far outstrip any extra costs from increased aid.

But critics pointed out that the “peace dividend,” while always possible in theory, has traditionally proved elusive in practice. And even if the savings materialize, they probably will come too late to ease the budget squeeze for a year or two.

The coming year’s budget fight is expected to be fierce enough, even without the extra strain caused by demands for more foreign aid.

Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that handles foreign aid issues, already has pledged to hold the foreign aid budget hostage unless the Administration relents on proposed domestic spending cuts. House strategists said that they expect Obey to maintain his earlier stance, even with aid to Eastern Europe and Panama at stake.

Administration officials said that with events now moving rapidly, the White House has not had sufficient time to draft its own counterstrategy. Planners conceded they are not even sure how much the total tab will be.

Aid that Congress already has approved for Poland and Hungary alone will cost nearly $1 billion in the next three years, about double what the Administration had budgeted. Estimates for the likely aid needed by Panama range between $200 million and $1.5 billion.

The rest of the East European package is likely to be small, but experts said the United States could end up having to provide some added aid to Mexico or other Latin American debtors if the situations there worsen. The Middle East, too, could flare up next year.

Nevertheless, foreign policy experts argued that the outlays will be necessary, both to ensure success in the world’s fledgling democracies and to maintain U.S. leadership in global affairs.

Congress has cut foreign aid spending sharply in recent years as lawmakers scrambled to save domestic programs from the budget ax. State Department planners said that many smaller countries where the United States could make some gains have been cut out entirely.

Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul A. Volcker, traditionally a hard-liner in urging Congress to hold spending down, has argued that spending to maintain American leadership is worth even the price of higher taxes.

“The costs are within our capacity,” Volcker argued in a column in the Washington Post last weekend. “It is the costs of withdrawal from leadership that are truly incalculable.”

Robert Z. Lawrence, a Brookings Institution economist, agreed. “This only indicates how niggardly our situation is because we aren’t able to fulfill our foreign needs,” he said. “I don’t see that any one of these things is potentially large enough to break the bank.”

Virtually all sides agree that the increased demands posed by the global movement toward democracy are likely to make the budget process more difficult, no matter what the outcome. Stoga, of Kissinger Associates, said the most glaring problem for the moment is that no one in Washington seems to have a strategy to cover the need.

“It seems to me what ought to be happening--but isn’t--is that we need to sit back and say: ‘Hey there’s something going on here, and we ought to plan for it,’ ” Stoga said. “The risk is that we could do it piecemeal, which is the way we are doing it.”