Next Step : Crisis in Gulf Tests New Soviet Political Resolve : Iraq used Moscow’s tanks to roll into Kuwait and the Kremlin resolved to set things right. The Soviet attitude has led to some fast foreign policy shifts.

When Secretary of State James A. Baker III told Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, that Iraqi forces had just invaded Kuwait, Shevardnadze was outraged and mortified.

“This is what 40 years of our policies in the Middle East have come to,” he angrily told an aide later. “Those were our tanks, and for all we did to prevent this, we might have been in them ourselves.”

For Shevardnadze, who had been meeting with Baker in the Siberian city of Irkutsk when Iraq, a longtime Soviet ally in the Middle East, seized Kuwait on Aug. 2, it seemed the nadir of his efforts to reshape Soviet foreign policy as a key part of perestroika , as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform program is known.

“We have come so far, done so much, and yet here we were on the brink of a catastrophe, an international conflict of immense dimensions and even a nuclear potential,” a senior Foreign Ministry official recalled.

“It was not that all we had achieved might have gone for naught, but that we seemed to have stepped into one of those worst-case, nightmarish scenarios in which the world gets ready to go to war.”

Shevardnadze resolved, the official said, that “we must set things right, reverse the aggression, settle the problems that underlay it and deal with the other conflict situations in the region.”

“Our ‘new political thinking,’ we knew, was going to be tested and tested very hard, and we must make sure that it not only survives but demonstrates its effectiveness in this crisis,” commented Viktor A. Kritinyuk, deputy director of the U.S.A. Institute, a leading Soviet think tank.

“If our policies could not cope and the crisis grew, then it could be argued that they were dangerously ineffective and should be abandoned. . . . If we have shown surprising determination, that is the root of it. We were in danger of dithering, and to do so would compound the crisis.”

This resolve, a reflection of Shevardnadze’s commitment to reinforcing what Moscow calls “new political thinking,” is now repositioning the Soviet Union in the Middle East in some of the fastest changes in Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev.

It is also strengthening Soviet-American rapprochement. Cooperation has visibly replaced competition in the Middle East, where wars have historically triggered confrontations between Moscow and Washington. Diplomats from both countries now discuss ways in which they can work together elsewhere to create “a new world order.”

“However dangerous the gulf crisis may be in itself and however important it is to settle it,” Yevgeny M. Primakov, Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy adviser, said last week, “I think we should proceed from the fact that it offers a kind of laboratory, testing our efforts to create a new world order after the Cold War.”

In responding to the crisis in the Persian Gulf over the past two months, the Soviet Union has made a number of such major moves, each of which would have made headlines alone in previous years; together, they constitute a dramatic shift in Moscow’s posture in the Middle East. Among them:

* The Soviet Union condemned Iraq’s action unequivocally, and it immediately halted arms shipments to Baghdad.

Objections to the policy came from many Soviet specialists in the Middle East, from the military and from die-hard conservatives. They opposed criticizing a “revolutionary” ally and acquiescing in American military intervention in a region long regarded by the Kremlin as strategic and sensitive. But the critics were overruled after a rare public debate on foreign policy.

Moscow’s stand put its relations with many other Third World countries on a different basis. No longer, Moscow made clear, would it tolerate the use of military force in international disputes, particularly when it had supplied the arms, and no longer would it acquiesce in the intervention by radical regimes in other countries to establish “progressive” governments.

“Liberation forces throughout the world, including in Arab countries and the Palestinian people in particular, cannot see the Soviet Union as a friend or ally,” said Abdullah Hourani, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, criticizing the new Soviet stance.

* The Soviet Union worked with the United States to shape one resolution after another at the U.N. Security Council, laying down the fundamental demand that Iraq withdraw its troops immediately, unconditionally and completely, and that Kuwait’s sovereignty and legitimate government be restored.

Shevardnadze himself chaired the Security Council meeting that imposed an air blockade on Iraq, and he warned Iraq in the U.N. General Assembly of the organization’s power to “suppress acts of aggression” with military force, if necessary.

Although U.S. diplomats sometimes complained that their Soviet colleagues were softening the language of the resolutions or delaying them a day or two, Moscow felt that its responsibility in the Security Council debates was to work for unanimous or near-unanimous support for the resolutions. The close Soviet-American cooperation was itself a message to Iraq and to the world.

* In a major diplomatic initiative, closely coordinated with the United States, France and other Western countries, Gorbachev last week dispatched Primakov, a member of his policy-making Presidential Council and a leading Soviet specialist on the Middle East, to press President Saddam Hussein of Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait and enter negotiations on a political settlement of the crisis.

In return for a pullout, Iraq would get negotiations on the original issues in the dispute with Kuwait and a chance to claim credit for starting the Middle East on the road toward resolving the region’s other conflicts, notably that between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

International pressure is already building behind a Shevardnadze suggestion last month to use the momentum that would come from resolution of the gulf crisis to tackle the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian problem and the Lebanese civil war in a series of negotiations and an overall conference on the Middle East.

* Moscow raised its growing dialogue with Israel to a new level at the end of September. Gorbachev met with two Israeli Cabinet ministers who flew to Moscow to see him and agreed to establish “consular” relations in lieu of the diplomatic ties broken during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The Soviet Union continues, meanwhile, to dilute its longstanding demand that Israel participate in an international conference on the Middle East as a condition for the restoration of diplomatic relations. From actual participation, the requirement has gone to agreement to participate, to readiness to participate, to an indication that Israel is prepared to participate in a process leading to a conference.

“Not having relations with Israel is a real handicap,” Igor P. Belayev, a leading Soviet specialist on the Middle East, said in an interview. “It means, first of all, we are limiting our dialogue with a nation that we must talk with and work with.”

* The Soviet Union also resumed full diplomatic relations last month with Saudi Arabia, the conservative desert kingdom, after a break of more than half a century. The move reflected a desire to underscore Moscow’s opposition to the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait and to move away from foreign policies that had been based on ideology.

“The restoration of relations with the Saudis is clear evidence of our new posture,” Belayev said. “If we still adhered to our old approach in the Middle East, where we supported so-called progressives against ‘reactionaries,’ we would not be going to Saudi Arabia, and they certainly would not be welcoming us. . . .

“Arabs will see the shift immediately--the Saudis and the Soviets--and it will send a signal across the region. If the Saudis talk to us, it is safe for everyone to do so.”

Moscow’s moves, even while in progress, quickly won Washington’s recognition that the Soviet Union is playing a key role in the Middle East.

President Bush, reversing decades of U.S. policy aimed at reducing or even eliminating Soviet influence in the region, told Gorbachev at their summit meeting in Helsinki last month that the United States wants the Soviet Union as a partner in the search for peace in the region.

In asking for Soviet help on the gulf crisis, Bush was by logic extending it to an eventual joint Soviet-American effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. For that reason, some U.S. analysts criticized the Bush move, arguing that he had reinstated Moscow in a game that it had already lost.

“We might have plotted and worked and plotted and worked for years to win such acceptance,” Vitaly V. Naumkin, deputy director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, acknowledged. “Yet, when it came, it was through this crisis, and we were far from prepared to take advantage. . . .

“What we have done, we have done of necessity, largely to preserve the gains of ‘new political thinking’ and our relationship with the United States and the West. That is the overriding and bolder concept--a Soviet-American partnership in which neither seeks to profit at the other’s expense.”

Moscow, in fact, had been improving relations with Israel steadily for the past three years, had carefully laid the foundation for resumption of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia and had been discussing the Middle East with the United States.

“The tough part was deciding where our interests lay,” a senior Soviet diplomat said last week. “A traditional hard-core insisted, still insists even, that they lay with Iraq, a country we have had a 30-year relationship with. ‘Don’t look at the Persian Gulf crisis,’ they argue. ‘Look at the Middle East as a whole, fit the gulf crisis in, then decide what our priorities are.’

“That logic is old thinking that takes us back to East versus West, good guys versus bad guys, cowboys and Indians. Clearly the Iraqis were aggressors, and any refusal to say so forthrightly and then carry through would have reduced to nonsense everything we have tried to do. We cannot say that we are for peace with America but back the war with Kuwait. So, we condemned the aggression and are pursuing a peaceful resolution there, even though the odds are probably 3 to 1 against it.”