EASTERN EUROPE : Ex-Warsaw Pact Nations Evolve Into Neutral Buffer Zone : They cherish their freedom but feel exposed and look to the West for some form of protection. But what form?

It seemed merely an innocuous close to a meeting of two heads of state when President Bush and Poland’s President Lech Walesa recently signed a declaration of “cooperation and partnership.” But for all its diplomatic formality, the gesture amounted to a careful first step by the United States toward extending a mantle of security over Poland--and perhaps the rest of Eastern Europe.

It was the latest development that underscores a new reality: East European nations, less than two years after their anti-Communist revolts, have shed their Moscow-ordained role as springboard for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. They have already become an essentially neutral buffer zone between the Soviet Union and the West.

Whether they should become more than that--perhaps a “strategic buffer zone” for the West against Moscow, armed with as many Western weapons as Soviet--is an issue under considerable debate now in the U.S. government, in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and in Europe more broadly.

Responding to appeals from the region for protection amid a growing security vacuum, the U.S.-Polish statement, issued in March, was the clearest warning yet to Moscow to stay out of Eastern Europe now that it has gotten out. But it left deliberately ambiguous what the United States would do if Moscow were to try to reverse its pullout by again invading an East European nation.

The declaration, signed by the two presidents to give it more significance than an ordinary visit-ending communique, stated that the two nations “share an interest in maintaining stability and security in the new Europe.”

It added that “the United States attaches great importance to the consolidation and safeguarding of Poland’s democracy and independence.”

“That represents one little big toe in the water, “ says a senior State Department official. “We’re saying we would not be indifferent if the Soviets tried to move back” with tanks and troops, as they did in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, “but we’re not saying what we would do.”

“We can’t leave East Europe hanging out there with nowhere to go,” echoes a senior Bush Administration official. “At the same time, we can’t make them allies within NATO.”

The U.S.-Polish declaration was not the first time the issue had arisen. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, which recently formed a political cooperative group, have with increasing openness appealed to the West for some kind of security umbrella.

“We are groping with how best to address East Europe’s security concerns, the West’s security concerns and the Soviet perspective on all this,” says the senior U.S. official. “It is in nobody’s interest to have the Soviets believe that East Europe is becoming allied with NATO and a threat to Soviet borders.”

In fact, the Soviet defense line has moved eastward several hundred miles, from the Elbe River between the former East and West Germany to the Bug River that separates Poland from Soviet Russia.

“Formal incorporation of East Europe into NATO is just not on,” the official adds, “but East Europe has legitimate security concerns which are in our broad interest to help meet--subject to not panicking the Soviets or creating unrealistic expectations on the part of the East Europeans.”

The most favored approach is to integrate East Europeans first into the West European economic and political community. Translating those ties into security assurances, however, would result in disputes over the future of NATO.

A growing consensus wants a stronger defense organization within the nine-nation Western European Union, for example. The United States does not belong to the WEU, however, and this has opened the door for French-led efforts to dilute the American, and NATO’s, voice in the Continent’s future military defense.

A measure of the intensity of the argument is that the United States recently delivered a “demarche,” or diplomatic protest, to each WEU nation after a seemingly mundane bureaucratic decision to move its headquarters from London to Brussels. France and other members insist that each nation be represented in WEU by their ambassadors to the Economic Community in Brussels, while the United States and Britain want the NATO ambassadors, based in Brussels, to sit at the WEU.

At the more strategic level, several private experts want the United States and the Soviet Union to convert the three loosely bonded East European states into “defensively armed neutrals,” as the RAND Corp.’s Paul K. Davis and Robert D. Howe term it, “and everyone should recognize this dividing line between East and West.”

“The East Europeans won’t want it,” Davis says, “but it’s part of the geographic facts of life. Their permanent military neutrality would be in their interest, as well as the Soviets’ and ours. We ought to make clear where the line is in order to avoid miscalculations.”

“My analogy is with Kuwait,” Davis explains. “It was not itself of vital interest to the United States but was in a region of vital interest to us (last year before Iraq invaded). We had no commitment to it; no one likes to extend such commitments as a general principle. And this is a situation that’s repeating now in East Europe.

“It’s not in our national consciousness now, but if the Soviets re-entered East Europe in six or seven years, I’m convinced we’d decide that it was unacceptable, as we did with Kuwait,” he adds.

Times staff writer Don Shannon contributed to this story.

SHIFTING ALLIANCES

U.S. position: “we can’t leave East Europe hanging out there with nowhere to go,” a senior U.S. official says. “At the same time, we can’t make them allies within NATO.”

Soviet position: Any effort to formally include Eastern Europe within NATO would certainly anger Moscow and at least delay the withdrawal of Soviet forces.

Jeane Kirkpatrick: America’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, wants East European states to be members of NATO. Alliances of democracies should be “open-ended,” she argues, meaning they should be open to all in order to remain true to their goals.

Vaclav Havel: Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel says full membership in NATO is not possible “for the time being..” He wants to set up “a lasting system” of ties between the organization and his country. Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary have formal liaison offices now at NATO.

Lech Walesa: Polish President Lech Walesa, during his visit to Washington in March, asked Defense Secretary Dick Cheney how the United States would view an effort to buy weapons from U.S. or West European firms. Cheney replied that such sales would be “premature in the relationship.”

Jozsef Antall: Hungary’s Prime Minister Jozsef Antall was the first leader of the former Soviet Block to broach the subject of possible NATO membership. He has received the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in Budapest and will send Hungary’s military intelligence chief here in June.