Fast-Moving European Events Keep Overtaking U.S. Policy Initiatives : Diplomacy: Swift pace of East-West convergence on the issue of reunifying Germany puts the latest crimp in Washington’s plans for the Continent.

Three weeks ago, concerned that the peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe had rendered his troop reduction plans obsolete, President Bush ordered his top advisers to review the situation and come up with a new plan. Now, less than 48 hours after the new plan was unveiled, events once again seem to have leapfrogged past the American position.

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher flew to Washington on Friday for a meeting with Secretary of State James A. Baker III on the latest moves toward German reunification. But even before they talked, the increasing agreement by both the East and West German governments on the principle of a single German state appeared to be cutting the ground away from the United States’ key insistence on keeping a large American military force in Germany “for the foreseeable future.”

As outlined by Bush in his State of the Union speech Wednesday night, the new U.S. position calls for both U.S. and Soviet troops in Central Europe to be reduced to a level of 195,000 each. That number is “a residual we think we can stick to” for the “foreseeable future,” one senior Administration official told reporters before the speech.

“How long the foreseeable future is, with current events, I wouldn’t want to say,” he added.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity, but White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu the next day publicly identified him as Brent Scowcroft, the President’s national security adviser.

Scowcroft’s caution about the life span of this position was well founded. Repeatedly, as Bush has acknowledged, events in Eastern and Central Europe have moved far more rapidly than experts in Washington thought possible.

On Thursday, the day after Bush’s speech, it happened again when East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow abruptly called for reunification of the country, a goal the West Germans have long advocated but Modrow had opposed.

Modrow called for the new state to be neutral, a stand the West German government rejected, but his dramatic announcement provided strong new impetus to the process of unification. Once-skeptical U.S. experts now consider it likely that by the end of the year, irreversible steps toward a single German state will have been taken.

Baker and Genscher refused to talk to reporters after their two-hour meeting Friday. Before the meeting, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler emphasized the discussion had been scheduled a week ago, long before Modrow’s announcement, so they could talk before Baker travels to Moscow next week. But she acknowledged that the controversy over unification would certainly be on the agenda.

The issue was also on the President’s mind. “I’m following it with great interest,” he told reporters on Air Force One as he flew to a series of appearances in North Carolina and Tennessee on Friday.

So far, Administration officials continue to insist that the latest events have not affected the American stand.

“There’s a need for a U.S. presence in Europe, and there is a certain number below which it is difficult for them to be militarily useful,” a White House official said. “Even if the Soviet Union pulled all their troops out, they’d still be within close driving distance.”

The official added, “As far as we’re concerned, the 195,000 is still realistic.”

U.S. officials want publicly to stick to that number “to try to maintain some order” in the process of reducing forces, said Robert E. Hunter, director of European studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here and a former National Security Council official. A public insistence on keeping a large number of U.S. troops helps calm the nerves of Western European allies, concerned both about the prospect of a U.S. withdrawal from Europe and the thought of a newly powerful and united Germany in the Continent’s midst.

But while the insistence may be useful politically, there is little doubt that a unified Germany would not allow hundreds of thousands of troops from two opposing countries to stay on its soil. There is also little chance that the Soviets, who have far more troops in Central Europe than the United States does, would agree to withdraw all their troops while leaving 195,000 U.S. troops in place.

The Soviets, Hunter noted, “are going to pull most, if not all, their troops out” because the new governments will insist on it and because of the burden the troops place on the ailing Soviet economy. But “they would like to pull as much of ours out as they can in the process,” he added.

U.S. officials want to “help (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev in retreat” while still finding a way to maintain American influence in Europe and preventing agreements that would bar the United States from reintroducing troops if some future Soviet leader proved more hostile.

In the end, according to several leading defense experts, including former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, the 195,000 troops Bush now calls for could be whittled down to no more than 50,000.