NATO’s Role Under Scrutiny in Rome : Defense: Some members seem to want to junk the alliance while the U.S. and Britain are firm supporters.

Anxious to redefine the most successful alliance in European history, the United States and its 15 NATO allies will confer here today on rewriting the bible of the military partnership that defeated the Soviet Union without firing a shot.

The mood among the victors after 40 years of Cold War confrontation is more pensive than exuberant as their two-day summit opens in a Roman suburb. The fruits of their historic victory have come to taste bittersweet.

NATO members, like France, seem to want to junk the alliance now that the Soviet Union no longer threatens--or at least turn the alliance into a purely European force.

But major players like the United States and Britain insist that the venerable North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1949, remains the Continent’s surest, most coherent guarantor of long-term security.

At particular issue for the summit, then, is a new strategic plan to replace the one that has been the West’s blueprint for defense since 1967. The old plan called for a massive response and the early use of nuclear weapons in event of massive attack by the now defunct Warsaw Pact forces. The new strategy proposes smaller but more mobile units, with much less reliance on nuclear weapons, and a rapid-reaction force with an out-of-area capability.

On the political side, the NATO summit leaders will promote closer formal ties with the former Warsaw Pact nations: the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, plus the three new Baltic states.

“The alliance will institutionalize East European connections with their ambassadors here joining in with NATO consultations,” a senior NATO official said. “Until now, it has been pretty much on an ad hoc basis. We will set up regular meetings between our members and Eastern European ambassadors.”

The emerging democracies of Eastern Europe have expressed interest in coming under the NATO shield, partly from a possible threat from a disintegrating Soviet Union and partly from the ethnic rivalries and violence flaring in regions once unified by communism.

“The Eastern Europeans won’t be invited to join NATO,” said another NATO official, “nor do we feel that we have to be responsible for their security. But we will go as far as we can to show them that they are welcome as observers or associates in the Western Alliance.”

NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner believes that the alliance for now should maintain its cohesion by remaining stable at 16 members.

For President Bush, who arrived Wednesday night in Rome, there will be two main challenges here:

- For one, the number of U.S. troops deployed in Europe is being cut from 290,000 to 150,000 over the next several years--signaling a reduction in America’s contribution to NATO that will be significantly greater than that being carried out by its partners.

- For another, Britain, Italy, France and Germany, the bulwarks of the European elements in NATO, have each expressed to varying degrees support for efforts to increase their role in the defense of Western Europe--at the inevitable expense of U.S. influence, American officials fear.

Indeed, there is considerable disagreement about the subject of a new Western European Union military force to reinforce, or even supplant, NATO.

France, which is not a member of the alliance’s unified military command and resents U.S. leadership, has been pushing with Germany for a solely European force that would take over most of the former military burden of NATO. But the United States and Britain view proposals for a European force under the nine-member Western European Union as a duplication of existing effort.

Further, U.S. officials worry that creation of a Western European Union force might weaken NATO, perhaps irreparably, and could eventually exclude America from European security.

The Germans have been caught in the middle, hoping to placate their most important European allies, the French. But, at the same time, the Germans do not wish to alienate their most important global allies, the Americans.

In Bonn, Chancellor Helmut Kohl attempted on Wednesday to ease concerns that the controversial Franco-German initiative to build a common European defense force threatens NATO.

“The alliance remains the irreplaceable foundation for a stable, secure environment in Europe,” he told the German Parliament in a major government policy declaration. “Only the alliance can . . . effectively guarantee our security and a strategic balance.”

But Kohl also stressed that the idea of a joint European defense policy was an essential part of the move toward European unity and should not be seen as a challenge to the alliance.

Kohl’s motives for joining with France are two-fold, according to military and political analysts here. First, Germany wants to pressure its European Community partners and underscore its own intent in advance of a crucial EC summit next month to push hard to make European political union a reality.

Kohl also sees a joint force as a way to ease domestic resistance to deployment of German military forces outside the NATO area, and possibly to skirt the present constitutional ban on such deployments, outside of NATO areas, if the troops were part of a multinational force.

In the wake of Germany’s uncomfortable isolation during the Gulf War, Kohl has advocated a constitutional amendment that would lift this ban, but there are doubts he will be able to find the necessary two-thirds majority to support such an amendment within the Parliament.

“I think the Rome summit will leave alone the problem of whether or not to set up a European military force under” the Western European Union, said an American diplomat in Brussels. “That--whether it is to be based on the French and Germans or the British and Italians--can be left to the European Community summit next month.”

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang in Rome and Tyler Marshall in Berlin contributed to this report.