Got Message, Ready to Talk : Lithuania knows the score; it can see the tanks. Gorbachev has made his point. So negotiate.

Now it is Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s turn to do the right thing. President Bush made a good call Tuesday in declining to ask for sanctions against Moscow over its treatment of Lithuania. Bush can always change his mind, but for now, he says, there is too much at stake to rock the boat: “I’m concerned that we not inadvertently do something to compel the Soviet Union to take action that would set back the whole cause of freedom around the world.”

His cause of freedom includes arms-control negotiations, German reunification, cuts in Soviet troop strength in Eastern Europe and Gorbachev’s domestic reforms, which have lately come on hard times.

The cause of freedom also includes Lithuania, even though it seems determined to make its break from Moscow as hard as possible for Gorbachev to swallow. That is difficult to understand because, for one thing, had Gorbachev not launched his reform programs, Soviet tanks might have plowed through Lithuania with all guns blazing instead of parading around in the middle of the night as part of a war of nerves. In another bitter irony, Lithuania was able to declare its independence precisely because Moscow restrained itself, hoping that its relations with the republic would become a showcase that would encourage other Soviets to accept Gorbachev’s economic reforms.

Bush pondered sanctions in the first place because there is a case to be made for Western nations doing more than scold Moscow for tightening the economic screws to force the tiny republic to renounce its wish for freedom. In the end--correctly, we think--Washington decided that Moscow doesn’t wish to keep Lithuania under its thumb forever, and that it wants only to postpone the break until the Soviet Union itself can stabilize.

This reasoning gets some support from the most recent Kremlin statement that the problem could be worked out if Lithuania simply suspended its declaration of independence for two years.

Lithuania refuses to go that far. Moscow keeps tightening its embargo of Lithuania, now down to a two- to four-week supply of energy, putting extra guards on the border and threatening to cut off more raw materials.

Through all this, delegations from Lithuania have gone door-to-door in Moscow, looking--largely without success--for someone to talk to them on their terms: as visitors from an independent nation. And that gives Gorbachev an opportunity to take his turn doing what makes sense and at the same time end the confrontation.

Lithuania has gotten his message by way of the embargo. Gorbachev has nothing to lose by plunging into serious discussions on the mechanics of Lithuania’s future freedoms without any further conditions.