The Message Behind Soviet War Warnings : Geopolitics: Don’t think the Soviets are unhappy with the Persian Gulf War--they see it as protection for the 21st Century.

The recent Soviet statements of concern about the war against Iraq have led many to fear a breakup of the alliance during the war and an ugly Soviet-American competition in the Middle East afterward. While the Soviet Union is, indeed, signaling that it cannot be taken for granted, a far deeper and more hopeful game is being played.

George Bush has not gone to war because of concern about the price of oil, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev is not thinking about how to acquire this or that client in the Middle East. Both are thinking about the world order in the 21st Century in extremely fundamental--and even visionary--ways.

The end of the century-long conflicts in Europe has fundamentally changed the focus of the geostrategic threat to the United States and the Soviet Union. In the next century those threats will come from an Asia beset by all the economic, psychological, social and ethnic conflicts that produced political turmoil for so long in Europe.

Today we worry about Iraq, a country of only 17 million people, acquiring nuclear weapons. What happens when someone like Saddam Hussein or the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini or worse comes to power in a country with pre-existing nuclear weapons and hundreds of millions of people?

The Soviets of Leonid I. Brezhnev’s era were fixated on the international threats of their youth. Gorbachev’s and Eduard A. Shevardnadze’s generation saw the present and future more clearly and understood the need to change old alliances as drastically as they changed in 1945. They were ahead of the Americans because their country borders Asia--and because they fear the spread of the political and religious movements of the Muslim world to their own 50 million Muslims. However, President Bush’s phrase “new world order” bespeaks a similar understanding and policy.

Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait was both an affront to the United States and the Soviet Union and an opportunity. The Soviet Union had used its navy to protect Kuwaiti shipping against Iran in the latter war’s with Iraq, virtually forcing the United States to use its ships for the same purpose. This de facto Soviet-American cooperation was a key factor in persuading Iran to end the war, and Kuwait became a symbol of the new alliance.

Incredibly, Hussein chose to seize Kuwait while Secretary of State James A. Baker III was on a trip to the Soviet Union. Seldom has a small power thrown down the gauntlet to two superpowers in such a dramatic way, and the joint Shervardnadze-Baker response from Moscow and subsequent United Nations cooperation were the natural response. But because both sides were looking for a symbol of the military threat from Asia in the 21st Century, they also saw Hussein’s action as a godsend.

It is a most fundamental mistake to think that Gorbachev and the Soviet military are unhappy with the course of the war. The war dramatizes the Soviet-American alliance that will protect the Soviet Union in the next century and facilitate Soviet access to Western investment and technology before then. It accelerates American withdrawal from Germany (our troops have gone from 300,000 to 150,000 in a few months). It commits the United States to the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism after the war, while it reminds Soviet citizens of European stock of the danger from the south and increases their fear of a breakup of the country.

Soviet envoy Yevgeny Primakov returned to Iraq this week for the same reasons he went before: to see if our joint war aims can be achieved without major loss of American life, to warn Hussein that in a ground war U.S. aims will inevitably be broader, and to allow the United States to say that all avenues of peace were explored before we moved. Small wonder that the Administration is happy with the mission.

What concerns the Soviet leaders is the future. It makes no sense for the Soviet Union to sacrifice pawns like Iraq if other goals are not achieved. The Soviet leadership expects to be a player in the Middle East after the war as well as during it. They expect the alliance to be maintained and deepened, including the development of the economic relationships that normally prevail among allies. They expect that the United States will not destabilize the Soviet Muslim areas with its policy in the Baltics.

Every piece of evidence indicates that the Bush Administration has a very clear sense of American interests in the new world and will not disappoint its Soviet counterpart. 1991 will not see a worsening of Soviet-American relations, but their deepening--with Japan drawn in as well. George Bush plans to go into 1992 with a Soviet Union relationship that makes Richard Nixon’s detente of 1972 absolutely pale in comparison. If the Democrats form a human-rights alliance with Boris Yeltsin and the Baltic radicals, they will not do as well as George McGovern did in 1972.