COLUMN ONE : For Think Tanks, Lots to Rethink : From Santa Monica to Washington, they’re scrambling to keep up with the changes in Eastern Europe. Prestige and funding are at stake.

The collapse of communism and the apparent end of the Cold War have thrown many of America’s foreign and defense policy think tanks into confusion.

These clusters of academic specialists who produce everything from secret studies for the government on the balance of nuclear forces to short opinion articles for the op-ed pages of the country’s newspapers are finding the assumptions of the last 40 years suddenly and fundamentally challenged. Like governments around the world, they are scrambling to keep up with events.

“The world is up for grabs,” said Bruce K. MacLaury, president of The Brookings Institution in Washington.

Some think tanks, like the RAND Corp. of Santa Monica, face if not a threat to their existence at least a very stiff challenge to change what they think about, how they think it and their means of support. Others find themselves caught without the proper resources to view a changing world.

Almost all, like the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, a long-established public affairs organization that supports a dozen scholars in addition to its officers, are discovering that the rapid changes in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc have given new energy to the too-often stolid precincts of foreign policy discussion. “Life is now 10 times more interesting--and busier,” said John Temple Swing, the council’s executive vice president.

Robert Kennedy-Minot of the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, Calif., who specializes in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, finds the new atmosphere confusing but intellectually freshening. “I am far from feeling that something firm is slipping from my life. It opens up all sorts of possibilities for research.”

No one claims to have foreseen the rapid shifts in the communist world, and in relations between that world and the West.

“Of course we were brought up short,” MacLaury of The Brookings Institution said.

“Yes, the experts have been as completely surprised as the laymen,” agreed James A. Smith, the acknowledged expert on the experts and author of the book “The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite.”

Why were they surprised?

“Most of the people in think tanks deal in short-term policy issues and are not accustomed to thinking about epoch-shattering moments,” Smith said. “And Americans being almost spectators at these events may add to the perplexity of our cadre of experts. We are on the sidelines without measures to advocate or policies to defend. Our American think tanks are very practical places. They are very good at taking a proposal, beating it around and analyzing it. Few are the places that take the long view.”

Robert E. Hunter, vice president for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said “think tanks have to decide whether to be ‘blue sky’ or politically relevant. The sources of funding--both businesses and foundations--aren’t terribly enthusiastic about trying new ideas.”

Some of these institutions seek merely to inform, like the Council on Foreign Relations; others to persuade, like the assertively conservative Heritage Foundation of Washington; still others, like RAND, chiefly to provide outside intellectual assistance to the U.S. government that largely supports them.

Their audience is mostly government and the people and institutions who can influence government. Increasingly the think tanks have learned to use the news media to make their views known to policy makers. The media, in turn, have grown dependent on the think tanks as a source of articles for their opinion pages and for commentators for television and radio discussion shows.

Media Reaches Policy Makers

The rapid changes in the communist world, far from making the think tanks incidental, have increased the demand for their contributions even as events move at times faster than analysis.

“We are half again as busy as any time in the last decade,” said Swing of the Council on Foreign Relations. “Our European fellows--specialists in both Eastern and Western Europe--are being dragged crazy . . . answering questions from the media and appearing on television news programs and radio talk shows,” he said.

“It is exhilarating and it is challenging. One hundred or so people here have been going like fireworks in the past few weeks,” said James A. Thomson, president of RAND since Donald B. Rice, its longtime president, left last year to become President Bush’s secretary of the Air Force.

For example, RAND has set up a special internal computer network called “euro.” On it, specialists on Germany, Europe and the Soviet Union and the East-West confrontation that dominated the world’s international arrangements from the end of World War II to the very present exchange messages, minipapers, arguments and counterarguments. These ideas will eventually crystallize into papers and studies for RAND’s various government agency clients, mostly in the Defense Department.

Yet the changes that offer opportunity and stimulation to some present difficulties for others.

Change of Focus Alters Careers

“A lot of people whose professional careers have been tied up in a fairly narrow range will have to change or will have to do something else,” said Harold Brown, former secretary of defense and now chairman of the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

“Many of these are people who have focused on the technical military aspects of the now-diminishing East-West conflict,” he said.

“The main shift will be away from the military concept of policy in regard to Europe and the East-West relationship and toward economic and political issues, which are, in a way, more complex,” Brown said. “The exercise of foreign policy has become much more urgent as a matter of U.S. security. When the U.S. military power is relatively less important, and when its economic power is less, you have to use diplomacy much more effectively.”

Which is not to say that the analysis of military force and its potential deployment is now outdated or unimportant. A number of students of the subject agree that the smaller military forces being planned by the United States (and the Soviet Union) will require more rigorous analysis of their composition and use.

‘Intellectual Challenge’

“The intellectual challenge is how to do better with less,” said Alton Frye, Washington director of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hunter of the Center for Strategic and International Studies recalls the remark of a military observer when Britain was cutting back its armed forces 20 years ago. “When you get down to one ship, one plane and one tank, it’s jolly important to know how to use them.”

“The demand for an intellectual input is higher now than in 1982 or ‘83” when the Reagan Administration was rapidly increasing defense spending, the armed services were getting what they asked for and choices between one weapons system and another, one strategy and another, did not have to be made, RAND’s Thompson said.

Still, the changes are forcing the think tanks to remodel their allocation of resources and indeed to try to diversify and, in some cases, expand their sources of funding.

At the Heritage Foundation, which currently spends 40% of its $12.5-million budget on foreign policy and defense and 60% on domestic affairs, the 55 staff members will probably pay a little less attention to foreign policy and more to defense policy, according to Burton Yale Pines, senior vice president. “For the near term, the (political) battle will be for the shape of the Pentagon--what it will look like when it is smaller,” he said.

Pines said the Heritage Foundation, which presses its conservative agenda to Congress and the public, does not fear for lack of funding in what he sees as an era of conservative ascendancy.

However, the nonpartisan RAND Corp., which depends on government funding for about 80% of its nearly $100-million annual budget, may be pressed. In 1980, RAND had intentionally been expanding its domestic programs and was spending about half its budget on them and only half on defense, foreign affairs and national security. In the Reagan Administration, government funding for domestic research fell sharply and defense spending rose, so that now about four-fifths of RAND’s budget goes for defense and national security affairs and only one-fifth for domestic programs.

Looking to the future, RAND is making an aggressive effort to expand both its domestic programs and its endowment, currently $42 million. RAND wants to maintain both its equilibrium and its flexibility.

Having the money to think is one thing; what to think about is quite another.

Cold War Is ‘Intellectual Dead End’

Robert Manoff, director of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media at New York University, put it this way:

“The Cold War had become an intellectual dead end. I don’t think anything interesting was being thought. Are the think tanks, the thinkers, the universities of this country really up to it? Can analysts trained in one era cope with another? Do they have the suppleness of mind?”

Thomson of RAND says he thinks so. “We are basically in the long-range planning business. I see the problem as the management of change.” At the American intellectual centers, a more immediate problem is the shortage of specialists in certain areas of study long overlooked and now at the center of events.

“We are severely underinvested in Eastern Europe,” said Joseph S. Nye, professor of government and director of two centers of international affairs at Harvard University. “Eastern Europe has become much more important than people thought when they were making their career decisions. All of us are thin in that area.”

That will no doubt change now. Students of foreign affairs tend to follow the flow of events, and the events tend to dictate the flow of support money from foundations and institutions.

Leaders at the two most overtly political think tanks on the right and the left both sounded almost friskily relieved at the lifting of the dark clouds that have dominated thinking about international politics and war for the last 40 years.

“Now we can think about important things,” the Heritage Foundation’s Pines said. “The Cold War was a nasty intrusion. It was like a fire in the house. Now we have all that sand and all those buckets to deal with.

“I would probably say that the Cold War is over. Now we conservatives can focus on the quality of life in America.”

Conservatives Welcome Changes

American conservatives were dragged reluctantly into foreign-policy concerns by the experience with the Soviet Union from 1945-47, and by the communist revolution in China in 1949, Pines contends.

“We realized that the United States and Western civilization had to be protected. But now we can get back to the tasks we prefer,” he said. “We conservatives realize now that the true growth of big government came not with the New Deal but with World War II and its aftermath. Yet a big Pentagon is not something conservatives like. We are cheering for a smaller Pentagon.”

Marcus G. Raskin, co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, believes that with the end of the Cold War “the frozen nature of thought will now begin to melt.” Raskin, who calls his institute with its $2-million annual budget “the leading left think thank in the country,” believes that the changes will create new interest in it and its ambition to shake the fundamental assumptions of the “national security state” created by the Cold War.

“Most ideas in Washington are played between the 40-yard lines,” he said. “Now we can examine those institutions built up during the Cold War that are fundamentally anti-democratic, like the CIA, and try to change them.”

“These dramatic changes that no one imagined are like a vintage (wine) that comes once every 50 years,” said Swing of the Council on Foreign Relations. “So drink deeply, and drink well.”