O, What a Worldwide Mess Lithuania Would Put Us In : Independence: Every ethnic group should be able to live as it wants, but this is not an ideal world.

For weeks, Lithuania has been a front-page story in America, and countless commentators and politicians have talked about the immorality of the Soviet “empire” and the need for the United States to punish the Soviet Union to support the right of Lithuania to self-determination.

In theory, these commentators may be correct, but they have been advocating principles that would be a disaster for the United States to apply in today’s multi-ethnic Third World. Indeed, by loudly proclaiming the right of self-determination of ethnic minorities, they are already stirring up ethnic unrest in the Third World in ways that will be a disaster for us.

Compare the Lithuanian story with another that has been on the back pages of our newspapers since December: the Muslims of Kashmir struggling for separation from predominantly Hindu India. India, with its 800 million people, is nearly three times as populous as the Soviet Union; it has well over 100 ethnic peoples with separate languages, and 30 of these peoples have a minimum population of 500,000 (the Soviet Union has 26 peoples of such size); in the province of Kashmir, where unrest has been met with violence by the Indian army, there are more than 6 million people, nearly twice as many as in Lithuania.

What has the American response been to Kashmir? Congress does not call for the breakup of the Indian “empire,” let alone demand economic sanctions. Indeed, the United States, which for 40 years endorsed a plebiscite in Kashmir, has now abandoned that position, and last Friday the State Department revoked the visa of the leader of the Kashmir Liberation Front.

The American position on Kashmir and India is correct. In some ideal world, every ethnic group should be able to live as it wants, but this is not an ideal world.

Nearly all Third World countries are multinational. Nigeria’s population is divided equally between different Muslim peoples in the North and Christian peoples in the south. Last week’s attempted military coup in Nigeria was only the most recent such unrest rooted in this ethnic conflict.

In addition, Third World borders were arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers in the last century, and all the major peoples live in areas that extend across international borders. That is the case in Kashmir and in Nigeria.

True, the Lithuanians are in the Soviet Union because of force, but this is also true of the French in Canada and the Navajos in the United States. The Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem came under Israeli rule not because of their own actions, but because the king of Jordan launched a losing war against Israel in 1967.

If Americans say, as a principle, that all of these ethnic groups have the right to form their own country and that we will support this with sanctions, we will stimulate the most incredible amount of bloodshed, both in internal repression and in international wars. (Pakistan and India have already fought two wars over Kashmir, and a third is possible now.)

We sometimes say that we must choose between support for Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Lithuania, but this is the wrong argument. We should be cautious in Lithuania, because we don’t want hundreds of Lithuanians to lose their lives out of the naive hope that we can restrain Gorbachev. We should be cautious in Lithuania, because we cannot support ethnic liberation around the world and do not want to heat up worldwide ethnic conflict.

As we look at the most likely dangers for the United States in the 21st Century, we all know in our bones that they probably will come not from a Soviet Union that is integrating back into Europe, but from some new Ayatollah Khomeini who comes to power in a large Third World country with nuclear weapons. We know full well that the danger of an extremist nationalist coup will be very great if countries like India and Pakistan begin to disintegrate.

We have a profound interest in continuing the postwar process of bringing together the Europeans, but now we must include the Soviets and ourselves. Partly in response to the same fears that we have about the Third World (especially China and India on their southern border), the Soviet leaders are moving to return to their “common European home,” which means the Western economic and defense community. This should be our highest priority as well.

We should have faith that if we integrate the Soviets back into Europe, they will in a decade or two adopt European political institutions, as the Spanish did. We should talk about the desirability of democratic choice and about Lithuania having at least the autonomy of Quebec and perhaps of the Aland Islands of Finland. But we can never create good relations with the Soviets if we make demands on them that we do not make of India. We must end the Cold-War thinking that leads us to believe that we should.