Eagleburger Says Europe, Japan Must Be Priorities : Policy: Secretary of state urges Clinton to focus on relationship with economic superpowers.

Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger believes the biggest foreign policy challenge facing the incoming Clinton Administration is establishing a constructive relationship with Japan and Western Europe, an objective that he admits eluded President Bush.

“I don’t think we can . . . deal with any of the other issues in a meaningful way unless the United States, Western Europe and Japan find some way, collectively and collaboratively, to begin to deal with those problems,” Eagleburger said in an address this week. “And we’re not there by a long shot.”

He said President-elect Bill Clinton should make his first priority “preventing a deterioration of the transatlantic links and deterioration of the relationship with Japan.”

As the world’s economic superpowers, the United States, Europe and Japan almost certainly will dominate the politics of the early years of the next century. Eagleburger said it is important for Washington to induce Tokyo and Western European capitals to broaden their outlooks beyond their own economic interests.

“If we can’t help them . . . to put their money where their mouth is a bit more, and to accept the fact that with their greater economic strength comes some responsibility, we’re going to be in trouble,” he said late Thursday in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations.

His speech was a valedictory for Bush’s four years in the White House and his own 35-year diplomatic career.

He said history will give Bush credit for ending the Cold War peacefully, for dealing with the instability that followed and for starting the process of a new world order. “History will judge George Bush by the results of his efforts, by his mastery of timing and substance,” he said.

But he also acknowledged that the Bush Administration failed to give enough help to the reform process in Russia, the other republics of the former Soviet Union and the formerly Communist states of Eastern Europe. He said Clinton should do more but may find it very difficult to do so.

“The next Administration, quite rightly, I think, has identified the domestic economy as the first thing that must be dealt with,” he said. “I don’t envy those from the (Clinton) Administration who, in the face of that correct analysis, must tell the Congress they need an additional $2 billion to deal with aid to Eastern Europe or what was the Soviet Union.”

But he said that if Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin loses his post to a regime antagonistic to U.S. interests, the cost could be higher.

Eagleburger also warned Clinton to avoid the “moral hubris” that tries to impose U.S. ethical standards on the rest of the world.

“President Bush resisted this tendency throughout his presidency, often at great political cost,” he said. “But because of his commitment to working with, and maintaining leverage over, governments that his critics deemed (only) worthy of punishment and isolation . . . he was able consistently to forge international coalitions under U.N. auspices to address critical challenges to world peace and stability.”

He said, for instance, that China probably would have vetoed the Security Council resolutions dealing with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait if Bush had not blocked congressional efforts to end Beijing’s most-favored-nation trade status.