Won’t Change Europe Troop Plan, Bush Says

President Bush said Monday he will not revise his formula for a joint U.S.-Soviet military reduction in Europe even though the Soviets have rejected the idea because it would leave U.S. forces with an additional 30,000 troops.

Pointing to the geographical advantage the Soviet Union would have in redeploying units to Central and Eastern Europe west of Soviet borders, Bush said that “we’ve got a big ocean between us and . . . Western Europe” that would delay a speedy redeployment.

“I don’t think any of us think we can see with clairvoyance as to what’s going to happen the day after tomorrow,” Bush said at a press conference, defending his plan for maintaining U.S. forces in Europe.

The President proposed on Jan. 31 that the United States trim its 305,000 troops in Europe to 195,000 in Central Europe, most in West Germany, with an additional 30,000 in the rest of Western Europe. The Soviets, by this plan, would trim their deployment of 380,000 in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia to 195,000.

On Sunday, the Soviet Union stated its readiness to withdraw all of its troops from Central Europe, many of them unilaterally, in an effort to accelerate the negotiations now under way on reducing conventional forces in Europe.

The Kremlin, in a statement, said it accepted Bush’s 195,000 limit if the more than 30,000 American troops in Britain, Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey are included and if negotiations are scheduled to reduce the overall number.

Bush on Monday, however, stood by his initial proposal and reacted coolly to Soviet suggestions that the troop limits could go well below the 195,000 level put forth by Bush.

“Our European allies want us there,” Bush said. “I have a feeling that some of the Eastern Europeans want us there, because they know that the United States is there as a stabilizing factor, and we will be there for a long time to come, hopefully at significantly reduced numbers.”

Despite that area of contention, the President offered a particularly upbeat assessment of the broad sweep of U.S.-Soviet relations after Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s visit to Moscow last week. Bush said that work on treaties reducing conventional, strategic and chemical weapons can be “substantially complete” by the time Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev arrives in the United States for a summit in June. But he said he was uncertain that the weapons treaties and a new pact limiting nuclear testing could be signed by then.

And, even as he acknowledged that East and West Germany appeared “to be moving very fast” toward becoming one nation, he maintained that there was no room in Europe for a unified Germany that has divorced itself from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--thus seeming to close the door on the prospects for the “neutral” Germany favored by Moscow.

The President spoke at a time when the East-West relationship, in general, and the U.S.-Soviet relationship, in particular, are tumbling through dramatic changes, and his remarks reflected the almost daily assault on the Cold War that has left policy makers grasping to assess the changes and develop new positions to account for the emerging opportunities for democracy in Eastern Europe.

“If we continue this kind of momentum in our bilateral relationship with the Soviet Union, the June summit will be a major success,” Bush said.

Over the past week, the President has offered conflicting views of the changing world, a reflection of the domestic political pressure on military spending at a time of nearly unalloyed optimism about the state of East-West relations.

Last week, Bush carried out a controversial cross-country journey that offered daily backdrops of military operations straight from the peak of the Cold War and doses of still-tough presidential rhetoric as he pressed for approval of a $295-billion defense budget. On Monday, Bush spoke of the “extraordinary and positive week in East-West relations,” a week in which the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party stunned many with large strides toward a pluralistic political system.

But there remains the thorn presented by the prospect of a single, large, and presumably economically powerful Germany--a nation from which two world wars emanated.

Siding predictably with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Bush said, “I think that Chancellor Kohl is absolutely correct, and we ought to support him: NATO membership. I think it’s stabilizing. I think it’s good.”

Would that mean the same sort of full membership in NATO that has made Bonn an integral element in the alliance? “Sure, yeah,” Bush said.

He said the concern of “many Europeans,” that a unified Germany outside the bounds of NATO might pose a threat and could be dangerous, “would be allayed” if the nation’s membership in NATO was maintained.

However, on the central question that appears to be the greatest stumbling block--that of the role of troops in a new unified Germany--Bush said, “There might be some flexibility, obviously, on deployment of NATO forces.”

Moments later, he said the deployment question deals with the role of Western forces in what is now East Germany. Officials have said in the past that these troops would remain in the western sector.

In other areas, Bush said his top priority when he meets on Thursday with the leaders of three major cocaine-producing nations in Cartagena, Colombia, will be to emphasize that his Administration is moving forward “on all fronts” to reduce the drug demand within the United States.

The message reflects Administration efforts to ease South American concerns that the aggressive new U.S. plans for a war on drugs in the Andean nations have failed adequately to address American responsibility for cocaine trafficking in the region.

At the same time, however, Bush indicated that he did not plan to offer immediate new economic assistance to help those nations subsidize a shift away from the cocaine economy, warning that they “ought not to be condoning the growth of crops that are illegal.”

Bush also said he hopes to persuade the Colombian government to sign off on a plan that would deploy U.S. Navy ships to the Caribbean to monitor air and sea routes commonly used by smugglers bringing drugs northward from Colombia.

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this report.