NEWS ANALYSIS : President’s Careful Groundwork Pays Off : Diplomacy: Bush achieved nearly all his goals. And he did it without stirring rancor or resentment among the allies.

President Bush’s kinder, and more accommodating, style of personal diplomacy brought him no end of grief from critics in Congress and elsewhere during his first 18 months in the White House.

But it is finally beginning to pay off in America’s relations with its economic allies.

That is the message emerging from the annual seven-nation economic summit conference that ended Wednesday: After 2 1/2 days of hard bargaining among the allied leaders, Bush achieved virtually all his goals. And he did it without stirring rancor or resentment.

Bush spent much of his first year and a half in office accommodating the allies, especially the two most important ones, West Germany and Japan, on key issues. He also worked tirelessly to build personal relationships with Western leaders that increased the harmony among the major powers and left many of them in the President’s debt.

“What Bush did at Houston was to begin calling in his IOUs” from the six other heads of government, says J. Paul Horne, the European-based international economic analyst for the New York brokerage, Smith Barney, Harris Upham. “The guy has a very high credit rating abroad.”

Albert Bressand, director of Promethee, a Paris-based think tank, agrees.

“There’s a deep appreciation here in Europe because Bush was willing to pay the price for allied solidarity before,” Bressand says. “As a result, none of the other leaders wants to make things difficult for him now.”

The chronology is plain enough:

Bush was the first to support West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the drive for German reunification--and, in the process, to boost Kohl’s chances for election as the first leader of a unified Germany.

He skillfully helped Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu avoid a serious scrap with Congress that might have resulted in the imposition of U.S. trade sanctions.

He quickly acceded to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s plea to begin a joint U.S.-Canadian effort to reduce acid rain, reversing the intransigence of the Reagan Administration and ending years of mounting friction between the two countries.

And he encouraged European leaders to expand the portfolio of the Brussels-based European Community to include some diplomatic as well as economic powers--part of the “new architecture” of the post-Cold War Europe. Last year, the United States let the community take the lead in coordinating international aid to Eastern Europe.

Painfully for Bush, however, the reaction in Congress has been lukewarm, at best. Democratic lawmakers frequently have charged that the soft-treading President has been too lackluster in pressing America’s interests and has failed to exert enough leadership around the world.

But the White House may be getting the last laugh as it begins to reap the benefits of the President’s more collegial strategy.

“Bush may have seemed to be old-fashioned, but he actually has been playing a critical role,” Smith Barney’s Horne asserts. “He has been protecting the Western Alliance from losing what it has accomplished” in previous years as Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand begin producing ambitious new proposals in their competition for the leadership of post-Cold War Europe.

Bush’s ability to cash in IOUs has been especially apparent here in Houston, where the summit leaders acceded to U.S. wishes on agricultural trade, breaking an impasse that could have stymied the current round of global trade-liberalization talks.

They agreed to back away from establishing a $15-billion fund to aid the Soviet Union.

They scrapped a measure that Bush had opposed for setting long-range targets on reducing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

And they confined any changes in the Third World debt strategy to limited reductions in debts owed to Western governments.

In no small measure, the Administration’s more accommodating posture in its early months helped lay the groundwork for those successes. The U.S. victory on the farm trade issue, for example, came largely because a grateful Kohl broke ranks with his fellow Europeans to support Bush on what he knows is an important issue to the United States.

And Kohl, Kaifu and Mulroney took political risks of their own to help Washington on other issues, from the Soviet aid question to the environment.

In the end, even the European Community was less insistent on holding to its established positions than had been expected.

Bush virtually acknowledged those crosscurrents during his press conference Wednesday. Asked whether the fact that Kohl supported him on trade, even though he faces a pan-German election in early December, constituted a pay-back to Washington, the President was candid, to a point.

“I do think that the Germans appreciate the fact that we have stood at their side on this question of German reunification,” he said, and then mused, “The relationship . . . is hard to explain.”

To be sure, not all the U.S. successes at the Houston summit stemmed from Bush’s new personal diplomacy. As might be expected, in each case, the other leaders acted as a result of domestic pressures as well.

For instance, Kohl backed the U.S. stand on farm subsidies partly to repay Bush for having supported him on unification. But he also was wary about having to support East Germany’s inefficient farmers if the existing European Community subsidy program were to continue.

And much of Kaifu’s opposition to lending to the Soviets stems from Moscow’s refusal to return four islands in the southern Kuriles that it took from Japan after World War II.

To some extent, Bush’s “success” in fending off more sweeping proposals by the summit leaders was made easier by the fact that the allies were divided. As a result, many of the leaders’ differences were resolved by agreeing only on a broad framework that allowed each country to go its own way on specifics.

Nevertheless, the United States achieved virtually all of its objectives in Houston, and it did so without rancor or bitterness. That came partly because the allied leaders read Bush’s lips--and usually saw a smile.