President and Kohl Chart New Political Directions for NATO

President Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on Friday charted new political directions for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and said they are “optimistic” that the organization’s new look would quell Moscow’s fears of a reunified Germany that would remain a member of NATO.

Meeting for the first time since last week’s superpower summit, Bush and Kohl stood firm in insisting that a reunified Germany must remain a member of NATO.

“Any singling out, any neutralization (of Germany) always means isolation,” said Kohl after consultations over dinner at the White House. And out of Germany’s past bouts of isolationism in this century, he added, “bad things came about.”

Bush, bowing to concerns raised by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in last week’s talks, conceded that the Soviets “have some legitimate interest” in NATO’s membership and in the size and allegiance of German military forces. But he said he expects that NATO’s bolstered political role, which is to be the focus of a July 3-5 NATO summit in London, would help “lay to rest” the Soviet leaders’ objections.

While NATO has traditionally focused on the military threat to Western Europe posed by the Warsaw Pact, Bush Administration officials have said the alliance could serve as a clearinghouse for common positions on new political challenges, such as the instability generated by the newly democratized nations of Eastern Europe and the Third World.

“It is my intention to try to convince Mr. Gorbachev that there is no threat to the Soviet Union in a Germany within NATO and in a NATO with an expanded political role,” Bush said.

The leaders’ remarks came a day after Warsaw Pact leaders, meeting in Moscow, vowed to transform the pact into a democratic force for stability in Europe. The group, which agreed to alter the Warsaw Pact’s “character, functions and activities” in the coming years, called the military standoff between the opposing alliances “no longer in line with the spirit of the time.”

The meeting between Bush and Kohl comes less than a week after Bush and Gorbachev met in Washington to initial arms and trade accords and to exchange views on the future of Germany.

In what Bush described last weekend as a dialogue that did little to narrow differences, the superpower leaders sparred over the question of a reunified Germany’s membership in NATO. While Bush has insisted that the reunified states should become part of the alliance, the Soviet Union wants the eastern half of Germany to stay out of NATO.

The Soviets have proposed that an all-European council, such as the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, could help oversee Germany’s alliance and military status.

Moscow also has pressed the Western allies to help negotiate limits on the size of the German military, an initiative that Bush has firmly rejected. The Soviets have argued that such limits should be detailed in the “two-plus-four” talks on German reunification.

But the Bush Administration has countered that no talks should be permitted to single out the Germans for limits. Any negotiations limiting NATO’s forces should be part of the Conventional Forces in Europe talks in Vienna, Bush Administration officials insist.

On Friday, Bush said he has grown more hopeful since meeting Gorbachev that the Soviet leader will bend in his insistence that a reunified Germany stay out of NATO.

Gorbachev “gave some credibility to the idea that a country can decide what alliance” it wants to join, said Bush, adding that the Soviet leader appeared to “understand” that the continued presence of U.S. troops in Western Europe could be a stabilizing force.

But while Kohl acknowledged Friday that “the strength of the future German army is not a private matter,” he echoed Bush’s insistence that the size of the emerging state’s military forces must be hammered out in the course of the Vienna talks.

“I’m strictly against any going alone by the Germans,” Kohl said. “What we need now is more confidence and trust, and that can only come from consultations.”

Speaking Thursday at the 339th commencement of Harvard University, Kohl sought to allay fears that a unified Germany would return to the aggressive policies that triggered the two world wars, saying Germans “do not want to couple the unity of our fatherland with the displacement of existing borders.”

Kohl called the border between Germany and Poland “inviolable” and said the emerging nation’s relationship with the Poles should follow the pattern set more recently by West Germany and France, that of old enemies turned allies.