The Less Flaming Rhetoric the Better : Lithuania: The United States rightly tempers its response, since the stakes don’t justify risking Gorbachev’s survival.

Lithuania’s struggle for independence recalls bitter memories of Budapest, Prague and Warsaw--the crushing of freedoms to serve Moscow’s aims. But this time is different. Far from cheering Lithuania on, Western leaders are deeply divided in their own souls. This ambivalence, rather than the moral certitudes of the Cold War, will likely mark the future of East-West relations.

American temporizing must strike Lithuania’s partisans as particularly strange. The United States, never recognized the incorporation of the Baltic republics into the Soviet Union and always maintained the fiction of diplomatic relations. In 1975, when Congress pronounced that the Helsinki Final Act must not prejudice the rights of the so-called Captive Nations, it did so with unprecedented unanimity.

The difference now, of course, is Mikhail S. Gorbachev. During the past several months, he has undertaken the most massive strategic retreat in peacetime history. A great swath of territory and millions of people from the Baltic to the Black Sea have been freed. The Soviet president has initiated internal political reforms that, while still far short of democracy, have discredited Marxism-Leninism. And the promise of perestroika could turn Soviet attention decisively inward--for years if not decades.

Compared with the magnitude of this transformation, Lithuania’s lot must seem insignificant. Yet this can easily be turned around. If he is prepared to release a strategic asset as precious as East Germany, surely Gorbachev should not balk at turning loose a few million people whose value to the Soviet Union must be minor.

The rub, however, is that no one can know for sure just how “minor” that value is. If the Soviet Union’s loss of the Baltic republics were a final straw in the campaign by Gorbachev’s putative enemies to bring him down, the cost could be great. Lithuanians are not alone in wanting something from Gorbachev. Poles, Hungarians, Czechoslovaks and East Germans await the departure of Soviet forces from their countries. The West, as a whole, awaits results from talks at Vienna on limiting conventional forces and at Geneva on throttling the nuclear arms race. And 280 million non-Baltic Soviet people have a stake in the continued progress of Gorbachev’s reforms.

Essentially, this forms the case for Western caution: If Gorbachev’s position is weak, there is no telling what could push him over the edge.

Surely, however, Western verbal support for Lithuanian independence cannot spell the difference between the Soviet president’s survival or his demise. Furthermore, if Gorbachev were replaced, his successor would have to confront the same agenda for internal change, though perhaps less adroitly. And there is little evidence that the Soviet peoples’ stomach for foreign adventure would be any stronger in a Soviet Union bereft of the Baltics.

The case for Western temperance thus cannot only lie in fears that Gorbachev might otherwise be brought down. Nor is warning him of the consequences of using military force necessary to convince him of its folly. In Wyoming last September, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze told Secretary of State James A. Baker III that such an act would spell the end of perestroika . The Soviets must know that the West, and especially the United States, will tolerate military action against Shiite Muslims in Azerbaijan but not against Christians in the Baltics. A brutal crackdown in Lithuania would rekindle the American right, shock the left and paralyze President Bush’s ability to help the Soviet Union join the global economy. Thus would Gorbachev’s strategic gamble--trading Eastern Europe for outside help in rebuilding Soviet society--be lost.

In the end, whether to give full-throated support to Lithuania’s cause turns on two matters: morality of consequences and predictions about the course of history.

Despite the Soviet Union’s travails, it remains the world’s second most formid able military power. Those Western observers who believe that Gorbachev could not afford to use force or that his army would not obey orders will not share Lithuania’s fate if they are wrong. There is no possibility that the United States would do so much as rattle a saber. As opposed to its response following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States now has an interest in avoiding sanctions against Moscow.

At the same time, 1990 in Vilnius is not 1956 in Budapest or 1968 in Prague. Then, reform was stifled; today, it is well under way, even if the Soviets have not conceded independence.

The course on which Gorbachev has set his country will either succeed or fail grandly--with consequences from the latter unlikely to be limited to the Soviet Union. But just as his using force would jeopardize perestroika , so the progress of reform will inevitably erode Moscow’s capacity to impose its will on recalcitrant republics. Unlike the Hungary and Czechoslovakia of the Cold War, a Lithuania that does not gain all it wants today will likely gain it tomorrow.

The United States has thus rightly tempered its response, recognizing that the stakes do not justify even a small gamble over Gorbachev’s ability to survive. Wisely, both he and Lithuania’s leaders are now talking about talks, even if they remain far apart on substance. Indeed, they must realize that their destinies are intertwined and that both must act responsibly--for themselves and for a global future beyond Cold War.