Regional Outlook : With No Cold War to Fight, NATO Faces an Identity Crisis : Both East and West agree that the United States must remain a key player in refurbished alliance.

When the top leaders of the 16 NATO nations meet this week in what could be their most significant summit conference ever, the formal agenda will not reflect the most important issue: the future relationship of the United States with a post-Cold War Europe that seems free of the threat of war for the first time in almost 60 years.

There is no dispute between President Bush and the other presidents, prime ministers and chancellors planning to attend the meeting about the need to refurbish the transatlantic partnership that binds Washington to Europe. Even Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev agrees that the United States must remain a key player on the Continent.

Despite isolationist rumblings at the grass-roots on both sides of the Atlantic, European leaders, both East and West, are unanimous--possibly for the first time since the end of World War II--in their support for continued U.S. participation in European affairs.

There is no similar agreement, however, on how this should be accomplished.

The stakes are tremendous. Twice in this century, the United States was drawn into European wars that it tried--and failed--to ignore. And economic relations between the United States and Europe, including businesses operating on both sides of the Atlantic, now have a value approaching a trillion dollars a year.

“Europe has proved itself to be a cockpit of war,” a senior Administration official said. “The world is too dangerous now to allow Europe to revert to its natural state. The natural state of Europe, for all of its wonderful marks of civilization, goes to war quite regularly and harbors rather antique hostilities, animosities and grudges.”

For the last 40 years, the official said, the balance in Europe has been controlled by the United States and the Soviet Union, two nations on the periphery of the Continent. The result has been one of the longest periods of peace the region has ever known.

Bush Administration officials say privately they would like to convert the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into something of an executive committee of Europe--a grouping of economically strong and politically democratic states that could dominate the Continent for decades to come. As a first step, the summit meeting is expected to redesign the alliance, which Washington traditionally has dominated, to give it a more political character.

But, in a tacit admission that a NATO-centered Europe may not work out, the Administration is also pursuing a second avenue: It is pushing for a formal consultative link between the United States and the 12-nation European Community, the Continent’s rich man’s club that is quickly evolving into one of the world’s strongest economic forces.

As a third element of its strategy, the U.S. government endorses efforts to strengthen the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the 35-nation organization joining the United States, Canada and every nation of Europe except for isolationist Albania. It is the only forum in which the United States and the Soviet Union participate more or less as equals. But, so far, the Administration has assigned a decidedly secondary role to CSCE.

Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union and other members of the crumbling Warsaw Pact prefer to make the security group the Continent’s most important institution because it is the only one in which they play a part. Key Western European nations, all members of both NATO and the European Community, generally expect the community to become the dominant institution, although they support a continued strong role for NATO.

It is not hard to see why Europe looms so large in the Administration’s thinking. As Jay P. Kosminsky, a policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, put it, Europe’s “820 million people inhabit the world’s industrial heartland, producing just about 50% of the entire world’s economic output, compared to roughly 30% for the United States. . . . Europe potentially is either America’s greatest ally or its most dangerous rival.”

For 41 years, NATO has been the cornerstone of Western security. But it now is facing an identity crisis. Created to link the United States with the then-militarily struggling nations of Western Europe to deter aggression from Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, NATO now must devise a strategy to cope with glasnost, the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the rampant prosperity of NATO’s own membership.

The NATO summit, starting Thursday in London, is certain to adopt measures intended to give the organization a more political coloration and make it appear less threatening to the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the steps are expected to be modest, concentrating on matters such as verification of arms control agreements, which are security-related although not strictly military.

The United States wants the alliance to expand its influence beyond Europe--perhaps by trying to blunt the spread of Islamic fundamentalism across the Mediterranean from NATO’s core area--but France is adamantly opposed to any such “out of area” programs. U.S. officials concede that they will be unable to overcome the French resistance in the near future.

While all 16 members of the alliance have endorsed a transition to more political programs, the United States is the primary force behind the drive to make sure NATO will survive beyond the end of the Cold War. The alliance is the European institution in which the Americans are most in control.

But if the potential threats to Western security continue to recede, the importance of NATO may recede as well.

“I think it is unwise for us to harp on this issue of NATO becoming a political alliance,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department and National Security Council official during the Nixon and Ford Administrations. “NATO has always been a profoundly political alliance. But to suggest that NATO can sign off on its military activities is at least premature and probably very unwise.”

In Western Europe, top government leaders generally want to retain American security guarantees, at least for the time being. In other respects, however, they are becoming somewhat restive over the traditional American dominance of the alliance. There is increasing talk in Western Europe about the possibility of someday naming a European to be supreme commander of NATO military forces, a job that has been held by Americans since Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower inaugurated the post.

“The security of Western Europe was conceived in the context of NATO as a means of defense against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact,” French President Francois Mitterrand said in an interview with the Paris newspaper Le Monde. “The facts have not substantially changed with respect to the balance of military forces. But they have changed considerably in the spirit and approach of diplomacy.”

Mitterrand predicted that the need for the U.S. security umbrella will also change.

“I hope that one day Europe can assure its own security,” he said. “In practice, this is not possible soon. . . . (But) when the new face of European security will see its day, the strategic map will be turned upside down.”

Sonnenfeldt, now a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the growing perception that Moscow is no longer very dangerous--whether this view is ultimately true or false--will force fundamental changes in the transatlantic relationship.

“In the past, we have always said that if we got into a profound controversy over economics with Europe, we could always appeal to our common security interest to resolve it before it became an open trade war,” he said. “Now there is a concern that as the Soviet threat declines, we will no longer have this overarching security concern.”

Possibly with an eye to the receding military threat, Secretary of State James A. Baker III proposed that the United States and the European Community devise new cooperative approaches to “a set of mutual challenges--in economics, foreign policy, the environment and a host of other fields.”

In a speech in Berlin that serves as the blueprint for the Administration’s revised approach to Europe, Baker added, “It makes sense for us to seek to fashion our responses together as a matter of common course.”

Since Baker made the proposal last December, the United States and the European Community have agreed that every six months the U.S. secretary of state will meet with the foreign ministers of the 12 EC nations and that at least annually, the community’s chief bureaucrat will confer with the U.S. President. It is, U.S. officials admit, a modest beginning.

“This has started gradually and incrementally but it will evolve,” a senior State Department official said. “This is the best way to proceed without raising anxiety.”

“It is easy to make fun of this U.S.-EC consultation,” said Gregory F. Treverton, a senior fellow for Europe of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “But the itch behind it seems to be right. If we assume that the European Community is going to be the dominant political framework in Europe, then it will be important how we react with it.”

When the European Community was formed in 1956, it had only half of its present 12 members and its focus was so clearly economic that it was known as the Common Market. Thirty-four years later, however, the community has added political, security and foreign policy concerns, becoming a rudimentary United States of Europe.

“A great many West Europeans now think of themselves as Europeans almost as much (but still only almost) as they think of themselves as Frenchmen, Germans, Britons and so on,” said a group of European academics and politicians assembled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Frans Andriessen, the community’s external affairs commissioner, has said frequently that the community ultimately must address security concerns. Although most European officials insist that such a development would pose no threat to NATO, the overlap would be obvious. All community members except for Ireland are members of NATO. All NATO members except for Turkey, Iceland, Canada and the United States are members of the European Community.

“When the United States deals with foreigners, we like to have a lot of influence,” said Robert Hunter, a former National Security Council official who is now director of European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “NATO has traditionally been the place where we have had the most influence. If the power and interests shift toward economics and away from the Cold War and security, there is no way that the hollow shell of NATO can give us that influence.”

Nevertheless, Hunter said, Washington will continue to exert influence. “If that can be done through NATO, splendid,” he said. “If not, there are enough other ways to do it.”

Paradoxically, one of the strongest backers of a continued American role in Europe is Gorbachev. After trying for years to diminish U.S. influence on the Continent, the Kremlin now openly backs a continued U.S. role, including the stationing of troops there.

In a way, Gorbachev is trying to maintain his own status as a European power on the coattails of the United States. Although the Soviet Union is the largest nation in Europe, it is on the periphery of the Continent and is in danger of being isolated by the economic power of the European Community. It is in Gorbachev’s interest to make sure that the affluent Western Europeans realize that the nuclear superpowers cannot be ignored.

Gorbachev’s strategy for a “common European home” is centered on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, often called the Helsinki process because it first met 15 years ago in the Finnish capital. Gorbachev wants to build the organization into a Continent-wide security system, replacing both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

The United States supports some strengthening of the CSCE, which now has no headquarters, no staff, no permanent address, not even a telephone. Baker has said that CSCE should have a small staff, but he has emphasized that Washington is not ready to see the cumbersome organization supplant NATO.

“By its very nature--35 disparate states, each holding a veto on action--CSCE is unlikely to be able to make the difficult decisions needed to safeguard security,” the secretary of state told NATO foreign ministers last month. “We must build up CSCE mindful of its comparative strengths and weaknesses. (But) we should not try to make it something it is not: an alliance that can maintain peace.”

In the final analysis, it is the maintenance of peace that holds the transatlantic partnership together. And even if communism crumbles, that requirement may not disappear.

“We have won a great victory in the battle against communism,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ European group report said. “The only thing wrong with victories is that, afterwards, the winners tend to forget what brought them together for the battle: not the adversary, but the shared ideas and interests the adversary was challenging. If we forget it, the 21st Century will regret it.”

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Berlin, Michael Parks in Moscow and Rone Tempest in Paris contributed to this story.

The Political Face of Europe

What the United States Apparently Wants from Europe:

1. The reshaping of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from an exclusive security alliance into a group of economically strong and politically democratic states that would dominate the Continent.

2. An expansion of NATO’s influence beyond Europe.

3. A formal consultative link with the 12-nation European Community, which is evolving into one of the world’s strongest economic clubs.

What the Europeans Apparently Want from the United States:

1. A more equal transatlantic relationship.

2. To agree to the eventual naming of a European to be supreme commander of NATO military forces--a job that has always gone to an American.

3. To influence Germany to remain part of NATO alliance.

4. To stronger political and security role for the European Community.