World View : From Cold War Foes to Partners in Peace : The gulf crisis is testing the superpowers’ ability to solve regional conflicts through cooperative diplomacy.

When President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev met Sunday in Helsinki to discuss the crisis in the Persian Gulf, they posed a question that could reshape politics across the globe:

Could the two superpowers, whose rivalry inflamed so many local disputes over the last 45 years, now cooperate to resolve those and other conflicts? Could the global reach they developed in hostility now be used in harmony to promote peace?

“Yes,” both countries have been saying for nearly three years, and their initial achievements are not small--the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, independence for Namibia, free elections in Nicaragua, the new cease-fire agreement proposed for Cambodia.

Superpower diplomacy played a key role in each. Moscow and Washington talked through solutions between themselves and with their partners in a now well-developed model of consultations until agreements were reached.

None of the settlements have been perfect. Some agreements were manifestly one-sided, others were not fulfilled as hoped, most reflected the deep mistrust that made the United States and the Soviet Union adversaries for so long.

But a pattern of superpower peacemaking is now established, and with the gulf crisis Moscow and Washington are extending their efforts to resolving a conflict that is not of their making and where their influence has been limited.

Whether they are ready for such a test is uncertain, but a success would certainly strengthen their ability to deal with regional conflicts and such international problems as terrorism and drug trafficking in the future, leading Bush and James A. Baker III, his secretary of state, to speak of laying the foundation for “a new world order” in resolving the gulf crisis.

“This is the first time since the Cold War period that we are working together on the same side of the barricades on such an issue,” Gennady I. Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s chief spokesman, said of the Moscow-Washington consultations on the gulf. “It will show whether we are to work together in the future, or drift apart.”

Although the influence that Moscow and Washington could bring to bear varies considerably, the conflicts, present and potential, in which they have an interest range virtually around the world--the continuing struggles in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Central America, the tensions between India and Pakistan, the civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique, the unsettled domestic situation in several East European countries, the division of the Korean peninsula and, in all its complexity, the Middle East.

With the ending of the Cold War, the rapprochement between East and West and the reduction of both nuclear and conventional armed forces, such regional conflicts are regarded by many international commentators as the major threat to world peace and thus the proper focus of diplomacy today.

Regular discussions are under way between senior Soviet and U.S. officials on most of these regional issues; Afghanistan, Cambodia, Korea and German reunification had been receiving most of the attention before the gulf crisis. Last year, the two superpowers agreed to add broader international questions--including environmental protection, terrorism, drug trafficking and the arms race in the Third World--to their agenda.

Soviet and U.S. specialists on Africa are moving further with a series of innovative joint development projects, each undertaken with African participation, that will bring together the expertise of both countries to deal with some of the continent’s most urgent problems.

“Politicians and diplomats and even aid workers were on different sides of the fence in Africa for a very long time, and used situations there to hurt the other side,” said Anatoly A. Gromyko, director of Moscow’s Africa Institute and son of Andrei A. Gromyko, the Soviet Union’s late, longtime foreign minister. Explaining the proposed effort, he added: “The roots of this were ideological--the same factors that formed the Cold War mentality . . . .

“Without getting into who was to blame for the Cold War, we can accept that it was wrong and damaged not only our countries and those around us but others far, far away. Now, we must try to make up for that damage.”

An initial project uses Soviet expertise in curbing the growth of deserts and in using computers for climate modeling, with American technology in remote sensing and data processing to enable tribesmen in Botswana to move their cattle before land is overgrazed.

“The idea of Soviets, Americans and Botswanans working together should draw attention to what we can do through cooperation,” C. Sylvester Whitaker, an Africa specialist at the University of Southern California and co-director with Gromyko of the overall project, commented.

Similar results are expected as discussions expand on international issues. Cooperation is growing between Soviet and Western law enforcement agencies to curb the flow of narcotics through the Soviet Union. Soviet and American specialists on terrorism have held two well-publicized meetings--and more than a dozen others that were confidential. And, even before the gulf crisis, the two superpowers were discussing ways to prevent the spread of certain military technology--notably that for chemical and biological weapons and for intermediate-range missiles--to the Third World.

“The Soviets are starting to see many questions the way we do, and we have had some real breakthroughs as a result,” a senior U.S. participant in many of those discussions commented. “The process builds on itself. As our relations improve, we can do more about these other problems. We build trust, and our relations improve further. These are changes I never thought I would see.”

To some, the “new world order” envisioned by Bush and Baker is one in which the superpowers, no longer competing for global advantage, would use their authority to prevent a new conflict between India and Pakistan, provide famine relief in the midst of the Ethiopian civil war or halt the Third World arms race.

To others, however, “working together,” as Gerasimov put it, is reminiscent of past attempts at a “superpower condominium” in which Moscow and Washington conspired, as critics saw it, to impose solutions to world problems on other nations. The very announcement of the Helsinki summit, for example, brought nervous expressions from both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that agreements on the Middle East might be reached without consulting them.

“A superpower is a superpower, first of all, because of its nuclear capability,” Andrei A. Kortunov, a strategic analyst at the USA Institute here, commented recently. “But a superpower also has global interests and global influence. In the past, these were elements in our rivalry, but they waned as so-called ‘spheres of influence’ diminished and we became a multipolar world.

“Can this influence, these interests now be turned to something else, something positive, something healing rather than divisive? It is an important question because in many cases we have a residual responsibility; because we recruited allies or armed nations or promoted causes or directly involved ourselves in the affairs of others, often to their detriment and sometimes to our own. Shouldn’t we recognize our responsibility to go back and restore what peace we can and to prevent further conflict where we can?”

The Soviet Union and the United States have been dealing with regional conflicts for nearly two decades as a regular part of their overall dialogue, along with arms control, human rights issues and bilateral relations. But it is a checkered history. Some examples:

* Henry A. Kissinger, then-President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser, flew secretly to Moscow to negotiate the terms of the cease-fire that ended the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East at a point when some Israelis thought they were nearing a decisive victory over Egypt.

* The late Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin virtually ordered North Vietnam to sign a peace agreement with the United States before the 1972 U.S. presidential elections to aid Nixon--and was furious when Hanoi refused, deferring the agreement until after the elections.

* And some Sandinista leaders have complained that, were it not for Soviet arm-twisting and Moscow’s concessions to Washington before last February’s elections, they would still be in power in Nicaragua.

“Regional conflicts were always alternative arenas for competition between us,” a senior U.S. diplomat commented during the Helsinki summit. “But if the reason for that competition is diminished, if the rivalry is gone, largely because of changes in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, we ought to be able to take a different approach in a regional conflict where we formerly supported one side, so that now we would not look for advantage but for a settlement that preserves the peace and is fair.”

When U.S. foreign policy-makers talk this way, as more and more do, Soviet officials see the triumph of what Gorbachev calls “new political thinking,” the profound change he has worked in Kremlin approach to ensure Soviet security primarily through political rather than military means.

“We set out with the supposition, more hope than anything else, that if we ensured that U.S. security was enhanced rather than threatened by our actions (the United States) would be drawn into reciprocal moves,” a Gorbachev adviser commented last week. “Regional conflicts are an example--we do what is needed to ensure your security, such as supporting free elections in Nicaragua, and you want to respond by, say, not forcing the pace of change in Eastern Europe.”

Yet, there is some hesitation on both sides, according to Soviet and U.S. diplomats, and uncertainty about how effective the superpowers can be when they are not involved themselves.

“Despite all the changes that have gone on here, we and the United States still have different world views, different ideologies, different interests, different goals,” a Soviet political commentator said.

“And there is a deeper question of whether big countries should tell little countries what to do, of whether superpowers are wiser than middle powers or the countries directly involved. There is an arrogance implicit in the superpowers-know-best approach that could prove very dangerous by imposing temporary solutions on conflicts that explode later.”

There is little desire here, in fact, to police the world. The Soviet Union is a chastened superpower, caught up in the turmoil of its own dramatic political, economic and social changes and aware of the cost of its past globalism. Just the suggestion that Soviet troops might be deployed in the Persian Gulf brought protests from Russian mothers who remember the coffins coming home from Afghanistan.

“There are many, many things that we would like to do that we can’t,” Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, said when pressed earlier this month about why Moscow had not acted to prevent Iraq, one of its key allies in the Arab world, from seizing Kuwait. “But there are also many things that others would like us to do that we should not. . . . We will make our own assessments, our own judgments and act accordingly.”

The differences showed up quickly in Moscow’s reaction to the gulf crisis. Bush and Gorbachev agreed on a common, basic posture--the demand for the immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and the re-establishment of its sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity--but they diverged on ways to achieve this goal. Washington deployed massive military forces in the region while Moscow pursued a political resolution within a U.N. context.

The divergence was still apparent in Helsinki over the weekend. While they issued a strongly worded joint statement declaring unconditional support for economic and political sanctions against Iraq, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev clearly differed during a post-summit press conference on their readiness to use military force if other methods fail.

The Soviet approach might strike an American as cautious, but Western diplomats who have dealt with Moscow through more than three decades of crises saw an important political evolution.

“The quick Soviet reaction in halting military shipments and then a joint statement with the U.S. were signals of real change,” a senior Western diplomat said.

“Are they giving up their global reach by cooperating with the West this way? I think that they have enhanced their influence by acting as responsible members of the international community and working with the U.S. to help shape a consensus. . . . Moreover, they are creating an opportunity for the U.N. Security Council to work the way it should; in the past, the council was often paralyzed by the stalemate between the Soviet Union and the United States. We are just beginning to see what it can do when the U.S. and Soviet Union cooperate.”