U.S. Now Regrets It Sought Rich and Powerful Allies : Summit: As Germany and Japan get over ‘World War II syndrome,’ Bush faced increased uncollegiality at the G-7 economic conference.

It was hard to tell which country George Bush represented at last week’s London summit conference of the seven largest capitalist economies. On some days, he seemed to represent the world’s greatest--and only--superpower, victorious in the Gulf War and poised to lead the way to a new world order.

But then the subject would change from Saddam Hussein to interest rates, and suddenly Bush seemed the President of a shabby and decayed debtor nation, whining and pleading for his rich friends to give him a break.

At times, Bush bestrode the summit like a colossus. The United States and the Soviet Union completed the complex and far-reaching START negotiations to begin reductions of nuclear warheads; he briefed his summit partners on an apparent breakthrough in negotiations with Syria over a Middle East settlement; with French and British allies at his side, he sternly laid down the law to Hussein.

Those were the good moments--but there were plenty of the other kind. Queen Elizabeth, apparently out to avenge her own embarrassment last summer in Washington--the diminutive monarch was unable to see over the lectern when Bush forgot to arrange a platform for her--inveigled the President into sitting down at the wrong moment. The President, suddenly and uneasily aware that he had done the wrong thing, had to leap to his feet and mumble apologies.

Another woman, apparently failing to recognize the U.S. President, addressed him as “Geoffrey”--and was disappointed when she found out she was talking to a mere George. Meanwhile, President Francois Mitterrand of France devoted himself to upstaging his partners by making dramatic entrances long after the six other leaders arrived.

If his only problems had been social, Bush could still have counted the summit as a triumph, but there were policy problems as well--serious ones. The United States came to the summit hoping for progress on lower interest rates and agricultural subsidies. The result on both fronts: Zip. Zero.

U.S. arms are the mightiest the world has ever seen. With the Soviet Union preoccupied by internal problems for some time to come, America has no peers or rivals on the military stage.

No country has a comparable global network of bases, no navy disputes the U.S. empire of the waves and no nation even aspires to rival the United States for mastery in the skies.

This is all very well, and it reflects a great deal of credit on the people--many of them Japanese--who designed U.S. weapons, as well as on the fighters who have used them so effectively. Nonetheless, as nations have learned all through history, military strength is not the be-all and end-all of international life.

There is an art of peace as well as of war, and after 50 years of war--World War II against Germany and Japan and the Cold War against the Soviet Union--the United States has lost its touch for peacetime diplomacy.

The Bush Administration has a sound instinct for U.S. economic interests. Bush and his team know the United States needs an open international economy with few barriers to trade, and they know growth-oriented global economic policy is important to domestic prosperity. But it is becoming clearer and clearer that this Administration does not know how to get its allies to go along with its plans.

This boils down to the relationship among the Big Three of the G-7: the United States, Japan and Germany. These are the world’s three largest economies, and each is the dominant power in one of the three trading blocs gradually growing out of the old global economic system. The old form of partnership among the Big Three--based on overwhelming U.S. economic superiority and reinforced by the German and Japanese need for U.S. protection against the Soviet Union--is obsolete, and we haven’t found anything to replace it. U.S. officials talk about a “global strategic partnership” with Japan, and a new relationship with the united Germany, but these initiatives remain vague and misty.

Washington has yet to come to grips with the most important fact about the new world order: If we want Germany and Japan to help solve our problems, we will have to help them deal with theirs.

Building the new relationship with Germany will be tricky. Americans talk confidently about a new world order, but Germans worry their world is falling apart.

With civil war sputtering on and off in Yugoslavia and threatening to break out across the Soviet Union, and with millions of unemployed Eastern Europeans eager to emigrate to the West, Germany desperately needs foreign help to establish political and economic stability in the old communist empire.

Without active and thoughtful U.S. participation, Germany--and the rest of Western Europe--will seek to stabilize Eastern Europe through subsidies and deals at the expense of the rest of the world. Western Europe will take agricultural imports from Eastern Europe--and block its markets to goods from the Western Hemisphere and Australia. It will set up low-wage industries in Eastern Europe--and shut out producers in Asia and Latin America.

To build a new relationship with Germany, the United States must convince Berlin that its problems in Eastern Europe can best be handled through an international approach. We must make ourselves valued partners in the development of Eastern Europe if Europe as a whole is to grow in a way that benefits our interests.

Japan will be a little easier to deal with. What Japan wants most--respect--doesn’t cost much to give. Japan is a rich and important country and it wants to be treated like one. One thing the United States could--and should--do to build a real relationship with Japan on a new basis would be to support the Japanese quest for permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council. This would give Japan a veto and signify it has been accepted into the front rank of world nations.

U.S. support for a Japanese veto on the Security Council will strengthen our partnership with Japan and ensure that Japan will take a more active role in supporting U.N. decisions--and it will not cost the United States one penny.

Washington should not give its support for free, however; this and other steps by the United States ought to be part of a broader package of political and economic cooperation between the two countries.

War is hell, but peace is a mess. The United States has always wanted rich and powerful allies. Now it has them. But it turns out they have minds of their own. Neither Germany nor Japan sees the world quite as Washington does, and both countries are increasingly determined to build a world economy and a world system that meets their needs whether Washington likes this or not. If these countries give in to U.S. pressure to build up their armed forces, and if they get over the “World War II syndrome” that makes foreign military adventures so unpopular in both nations, they will become more independent-minded than ever.

The United States needs to think long and hard about its relations with these two countries. The bad news from London is: So far, the U.S. government has not yet begun to think.