NEWS ANALYSIS : German Unity Could Be Toughest Summit Issue : Diplomacy: The views from Washington and Moscow on the subject could not be more different.

German unity, an issue the United States and its Western partners once believed would be settled easily at the conference tables of Europe, suddenly looms as potentially the toughest, thorniest issue of next week’s super-power summit in Washington.

Certainly, the West has recognized that the specter of a resurgent democratic Germany in the heart of an increasingly westward-looking Europe is a key element in a changing superpower relationship, an element that leaves Moscow deeply unsettled and presents the Western Alliance with new and difficult challenges.

But pre-summit comments Friday by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in which he threatened to review Moscow’s entire arms control and security policies if the West stands by its plan to integrate a united Germany into the Western Alliance is interpreted as a warning of just how serious Moscow views the issue.

It is also seen as a call for help to the West by the Soviet leader for a compromise formula that can avoid the impression that Moscow’s more than 340,000 troops stationed in East Germany are simply going to be chased away as part of a NATO takeover.

For President Bush, analysts here believe, a prime task will be to stress German unity as inevitable, yet search for a formula both acceptable to Gorbachev and sellable at home to a public that is emotionally allergic to a unified Germany.

In an interview Thursday with a correspondent from the West German television station ZDF, Bush said one of his chief missions at the summit will be to persuade Gorbachev that a unified Germany should belong to NATO.

“We’ll sit down, he’ll tell me his views, and I will tell him that he has absolutely nothing to fear from that formulation,” Bush said. “I feel (it is) incumbent on me to try to convince Mr. Gorbachev that there is no threat to the Soviet Union with a unified German and with a U.S. presence and Germany as a full member of NATO.”

In light of his recent comments, Gorbachev is expected to pressure Bush for concessions.

While political observers believe that Gorbachev may eventually give some ground, doing so on such a sensitive subject just before a major Communist Party Congress scheduled for early July seems unlikely.

“Gorbachev would have very little to gain by making concessions on Germany before the party congress,” said Francois Heisbourg, director of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies.

Still, a flurry of diplomatic activity, including a one-day visit to Washington earlier this month by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and meetings this week between West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Genscher and U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III reflect a German view that the summit could be a crucial turning point in finding common ground.

The views of German unity from Washington and Moscow could not be more different.

For the Bush Administration, a united, democratic Germany integrated within the Western Alliance constitutes a triumph for the United States and its North Atlantic allies, nothing less than the successful conclusion of the post-World War II era.

It also brightens the prospects for a new, increasingly integrated Europe, a Europe that is already America’s most important economic and political partner and seems to promise only more opportunity and potential.

In the warmth of a glorious European spring, few here can recall a time when American and German interests were closer.

“For us, at this time, President Bush is nothing less than a stroke of luck,” Kohl’s national security adviser Horst Teltschik commented recently.

From the Kremlin, however, events in Europe are viewed as something akin to a fast-unfolding nightmare amid the debris of failed policies.

When Gorbachev and Bush last met, in Malta last December, much of the change in Europe had already occurred. However, only recently has the size of the Soviet defeat in Europe begun to register in the Kremlin, analysts here believe.

The revolutions in Eastern Europe have not just swept away the Soviets’ western empire. They have turned these same nations toward the West, toward the lure of modern technology and prosperity, to a degree that Moscow now fears being isolated and losing its voice in Europe.

In the course of this process, what remained of the Soviet trading organization, Comecon, has come unstuck, and the Warsaw Pact has been so neutralized that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization this week effectively dismissed it as militarily irrelevant.

“It is our clear assessment that the threat from a united Warsaw Pact no longer exists,” the chairman of NATO’s military committee, Norwegian Gen. Vigleik Eide, said Tuesday as the alliance embarked on a major strategy review.

Despite all this, those here who know the Soviet Union well argue that the loss of East Germany and the prospect of reunification are even tougher blows for Gorbachev to absorb.

“Even if the Soviet Union were confident and optimistic, (a united) Germany would be very difficult for them,” commented a senior Western diplomat here. “Now they see the GDR (the German Democratic Republic--East Germany) leaving the Warsaw Pact and joining NATO, it’s too much to stomach.”

An emotionally loaded German-Soviet political relationship that extends far beyond the realpolitik of 1990 also complicates the unification issue for Moscow in a way that Westerners find hard to understand.

At the cost of 27 million World War II dead--more than 90 times the 292,000 U.S. citizens killed in the same war--the Soviets have long viewed the division of Germany as their country’s premier diplomatic success of the postwar era, equating it with their elevation to superpower status.

“The Soviets count three real achievements in their postwar history: They developed the nuclear bomb, put people in space and divided Germany,” commented a Western diplomat here. “Giving away the gains of World War II is not just hard to sell the military, it’s hard to take in terms of national self-esteem.”

Faced with the inevitability of German unity, yet unsure how to sell it at home, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze have offered a rapid-fire series of policy options that so far have only Western rejection as their common thread.

Soviet proposals for a united Germany that was neutral, nonaligned or a member of both military alliances were quickly and virtually universally rejected by the United States and Germany’s neighbors within Europe.

Moscow’s idea of letting internal German unity proceed quickly, while limiting German sovereignty by allowing the four victorious World War II allied powers--including the Soviets-- to keep their rights to administer Berlin and station troops on German soil was also rejected by the West as unworkable and politically dangerous.

Meanwhile, the Soviets seem incapable of digesting the only real Western idea on the table--a united Germany, integrated within NATO, but with no NATO forces stationed in what is now East Germany.

Political analysts here believe that Gorbachev’s remarks Friday were meant to shock a Western Alliance confident that it would get its way.

His threat to break the momentum of cooperation on arms control and security measures is seen as one of the few gambits available to him.

He also has two more cards on the German issue to play at the summit table:

The more than 340,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany remain a potentially important bargaining chip in negotiating the terms of disengagement from Germany. (Moscow recently halted a partial withdrawal of these forces, in part, analysts believe, because of a lack of housing in the Soviet Union, but also as a less than subtle signal to both Germanys of Soviet displeasure at the speed of unification.)

The Soviet leader’s own vulnerability on this, as on other issues, has paradoxically become his greatest strength as U.S., German and other Western leaders carefully avoid unleashing forces within the Soviet Union that might tip him over the edge.

But with events moving swiftly against them, few here doubt that Moscow will eventually have to bend.

“We all know they’ll give in,” said Karl Kaiser, director of the German Foreign Policy Assn. in Bonn. “Even the Soviets say so privately. The question is finding the right formula.”