U.S.-Europe Ties See a Post-Cold War Chill : Diplomacy: With the Soviet threat receding, trade and defense issues now imperil a longtime bond.

From Munich and Brussels to Washington, diplomats and politicians are grappling with a nagging question: Now that the Cold War is over, is the long U.S. friendship with Western Europe heading off the track into a future of increasing conflict?

Two long-running U.S.-European arguments--one over a worldwide trade pact, the other over the U.S. role in Europe’s defense--suddenly combined in recent weeks to create an unexpected case of transatlantic jitters.

The uneasiness comes at a time when trade issues already have eroded the relationship between the United States and Japan.

The recent trip to Asia by President Bush, aimed at reducing Japanese barriers to U.S. goods, met with little success and was followed by sharp exchanges across the Pacific in which the Japanese criticized--and the United States defended--the commitment of U.S. workers to their jobs.

Now trade issues have become the source of tension between the United States and some of its staunchest allies in the West.

“We are headed toward a precipice, and the Europeans don’t see it--or if they do, they don’t really care,” Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), normally a master of understatement, warned at a high-level defense conference in Munich, Germany, this month.

Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek responded sharply. “That’s not how friends talk to each other,” he told the American delegation to the conference.

A few days later, at a similar meeting in Washington, “everybody was pretty pessimistic,” especially about the trade issue, said Harald Malmgren, a former U.S. trade negotiator.

For the rest of the 1990s, “the (U.S.-European) relationship is going to be . . . in many ways a more abrasive relationship,” concluded Francois Heisbourg, a Frenchman who is director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Behind the apprehension lie two specific issues: a long-running deadlock between the United States and the European Community over rules for trade in agricultural products, and growing doubt on both sides of the Atlantic about the need for maintaining thousands of U.S. troops in Europe to defend against an unspecified threat.

Vice President Dan Quayle, at the Munich conference, declared that the United States considers the trade talks--in which Germany and France have resisted U.S. demands for lower farm subsidies--central to the creation of a new world order.

“This is absolutely critical,” Quayle said. “It is critical to the security of Europe, to the security of the United States and to the security of Asia.”

Quayle’s strong words were “deliberately intended as a wake-up call to the Europeans,” a White House official said later. “He was pointing out that our military strength is based on our economic strength.”

While Quayle did not explicitly link the U.S. demands in the trade talks with U.S. willingness to remain fully committed to defending Europe through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, some Europeans, like Van den Broek, contended that the link was there.

“It does not work to say we’d better agree on (trade) or else America will leave NATO,” the Dutch foreign minister complained.

And several American officials admitted that the connection exists--if only in the general sense that a U.S.-European trade war would increase domestic political pressure to bring the troops home.

“We try not to make that linkage, but it’s hard to avoid it on an unconscious level,” a State Department official said.

The argument--which is far from over--dramatized the ways in which the end of the Cold War has changed both global politics and American priorities.

Once, after World War II, the United States poured aid into the shattered economies of Western Europe to make them security bulwarks against an expanding Soviet Union. Now the United States wants the Europeans to pay more attention to America’s economic needs, while both sides try to figure out their security needs.

American and European leaders foresee “a more complex relationship . . . (combining) cooperation, competition and conflict,” Heisbourg said.

But the elements of economic conflict are sharpening--especially because they directly involve domestic political interests on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the trade talks, the United States wants the European Community to phase out its complex system of farm subsidies, under which governments guarantee high prices for many crops, buy surplus production and sell it overseas at below-market prices.

The Europeans have dug in their heels, largely because of resistance from the powerful farm lobbies in two key countries. These are France, where the weakened government of President Francois Mitterrand is unwilling to anger farmers, and Germany, where Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s ruling coalition depends in part on the farm vote in the southern state of Bavaria.

Bush has appealed personally to Kohl, several times, to soften the EC position, but to no avail--a result that reflects another new factor in U.S.-European politics: Germany now appears to value its strategic European ties to France more than its old NATO ties to the United States.

The long-term problem, officials and outside experts say, is that if Europe and the United States fail to reach agreement on freer trade, they could inadvertently divide the world into separate economic blocs. “And the problem with that is that the blocs would probably tend to be belligerent rather than benign,” said C. Michael Aho, director of economic studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

France and Germany are working together on another project that some American officials fear has ominous implications for the United States: a joint Franco-German military unit designed to serve as the nucleus of a new European Community defense force.

U.S. officials don’t object to European countries handling their own defense, but some say they wonder whether the new force, which would not include Americans, will eventually replace NATO--or at least weaken the U.S. role in Europe’s military security.

“I think it’s clear that the French are out to destroy NATO,” charged Richard Perle, who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Ronald Reagan Administration. “They are creating this new force, and they are blocking all efforts to make NATO effective in a post-Cold War world.”

But others believe that the new European defense force can coexist with NATO. “This is not an insoluble problem,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department official.

“It’s true that some of the French talk about making sure the Americans no longer dominate European security . . . but most of the French want us to stay, too.” The answer, he said, is allowing the European defense force to grow “within NATO.”

The one certainty is that U.S. troop strength on the Continent, once more than 350,000, will continue to decline--weakening the U.S.-European defense link further.

Although the United States says it plans to maintain 150,000 troops in Europe, even some Administration officials say that figure is unrealistic. Several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee have talked of a 75,000 level, and Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) has talked of 60,000.