Kohl Presses U.S. for More Aid to Soviets : Diplomacy: Germany is determined to play a major role in world affairs, he says.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl, visiting the United States as the leader of a united Germany for the first time, said Monday that his nation is determined to play a major role in world affairs “in partnership with our American friends” and gently pressed the Bush Administration to offer more aid to the disintegrating Soviet Union.

In a speech billed by aides as a major foreign policy charter, Kohl staked out a position for Germany as the strongest nation in Europe both politically and economically, and promised to amend its constitution to allow German troops to be deployed overseas on U.N.-sanctioned operations.

At the same time, he pressed Germany’s view that the West must do more to prevent the Soviet Union from collapsing, a point he repeated later in a two-hour White House meeting with President Bush, German officials said.

“It cannot be our objective to help bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and it would be foolish to try and do so,” he told several U.S. foreign policy groups in his speech. “Such a policy would dash our hopes of achieving genuine disarmament and lasting peace, and I would never go along with it.”

He noted that Germany has given the Soviet Union almost $34 billion in aid, credit and loan guarantees since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

“With this effort, we are contributing to the stability and security of the whole of Europe,” he said.

“Our commitment is considerably greater than that of other Western partners,” he noted pointedly.

The remark underlined the continuing disagreement between U.S. and German officials about how best to advance the process of economic reform in the Soviet Union.

U.S. officials are convinced that the current Soviet plans “are not going to work,” a senior official said after the meeting. Bush reiterated that point to Kohl, the official said, arguing that Western countries should not provide substantial new direct aid until the Soviets make a stronger commitment to developing a true market economy.

Kohl’s argument to Bush was paraphrased by a senior German official in this way: “Your government and our government agree that we have an interest in stabilizing the Soviet Union. On your side, there is the question of whether it is possible to help (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev before economic reform takes place. On our side, we would say we all have an interest in preventing chaos.”

German officials said they have made no headway with American officials, and that they expect the United States and Japan to block proposals for direct economic aid to Moscow at the London economic summit of the top seven industrialized nations in July.

In public, however, the two leaders played down any differences.

“We are in total agreement about one principle,” Kohl said in a joint press conference with Bush after their meeting. “Reforms must actually be carried out in the Soviet Union itself.”

In their meeting, the two leaders also reviewed issues ranging from Germany’s role in the Middle East to troop cuts in Europe. On the troop issue, Bush said in the press conference that there had been “not much progress” in talks during the day between State Department officials and a top Soviet general aimed at resolving disputes over last year’s treaty cutting European armies. The talks are scheduled to continue today.