NEWS ANALYSIS : Solidarity With Allies Elusive, Clinton Finds

President Clinton has decided to take on the job of leading the world’s wealthy countries in organizing aid for Russia--but so far, he’s having a hard time persuading others to follow.

True, the seven leading industrial nations of the so-called Group of Seven did close their two-day meeting here with the announcement of a $43.4-billion aid package for Russia. But little of that was new money or outright gifts. Most of it consisted of debt rescheduling, loans and credit.

The end of the Cold War has given the United States’ historical allies the luxury of seeing their national interests differently. When Moscow was a threat, all shared the American goal of deterring Soviet aggression.

Now that the threat is gone, consensus is much more difficult to achieve across a broad range of issues.

The just-concluded conference here of G-7 foreign and finance ministers was a case in point. Two weeks ago, at his Vancouver summit with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, Clinton publicly urged the other G-7 members--Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Canada--to join the United States in pledging substantial new direct aid to Russia, especially in the short time before an April 25 referendum that may decide the fate of Yeltsin’s presidency.

Japan, Britain and Canada responded. But Germany’s finance minister, Theo Waigel, said his country has already given enough:

“Our national interest does not permit us to do more,” he said.

His implication was clear: To yield to U.S. entreaties would be to betray Germany.

Other issues turn up a similar pattern:

For instance, the United States has been pressing Japan for months to adopt an economic stimulus package to heat up Japan’s recession-dulled economy. Not coincidentally, such an economic plan would also stimulate Japanese purchases of imports from the United States and other countries.

Earlier this week, Japan’s Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa announced with great fanfare a $115-billion stimulus package for the domestic economy.

The timing was obviously designed to deflect U.S. pressure on the issue just before Miyazawa meets with Clinton in Washington today. But U.S. officials examining the package came away clearly unimpressed.

And on the issue of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Clinton Administration finds itself at odds with one of America’s oldest allies, Britain.

If Bosnian Serbs persist in rejecting a peace plan for Bosnia already accepted by the republic’s Croats and Muslims, the Administration says it will seek a lifting of a U.N.-mandated arms embargo for the Bosnian government, in an attempt--since all else has failed--to turn the war into a “level playing field.”

But unlike the United States, Britain has troops serving as U.N. peacekeepers in the Balkans. British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd has continued to resist the idea of allowing the Muslim Bosnians to receive new weaponry, saying that it would only create a “level killing field.”

Hurd occasionally goes so far as to imply that Britain would use its veto in the U.N. Security Council to block any U.S. attempt to lift the blockade.

“What we’re seeing here is the redefinition of our old alliances,” an aide to Secretary of State Warren Christopher said in the lobby of the vast hotel where the G-7 ministers were meeting.

“In the long run, it’s a healthy thing,” he said, noting that the realities of power and national interests have changed. “But in the short run, it’s a complicated process.”

So far, when confronted by allies with diverging interests, the Adminstration’s answer has been to turn up the heat. But the results have been limited:

* At international gatherings and in private communications, it put pressure on Japan to stimulate its own economy and to contribute to Russia’s economic renewal. It received grudging compliance with the U.S. direction--and an offer of credits that will help boost Tokyo’s own exports to Russia. Similar pressures applied to the others in G-7 have, in many instances, been no more fruitful.

* Russia, the beneficiary of all the attention, has balked at supporting tighter sanctions against Serbia that the United States has pushed in the U.N. Security Council.

As for the multinational effort that came together here, Christopher on Thursday pronounced himself fully satisfied.

“There is full cooperation with respect to the multilateral process,” he said.

But, suggesting the result was less than perfect, he also said he hopes the other G-7 nations could come up with more by the time Clinton meets with their heads of government at their annual summit conference in July.

And others in the U.S. delegation made it clear that they had faced something of a hard sell, working throughout the night leading up to the final session to gain agreement on the details.

A senior American official said the real purpose of this week’s ministerial meeting--from the U.S. point of view--turned out to be to put pressure on the allies to do much more for Russia.

“We really shook them up,” the official said with satisfaction. “We dropped that bilateral aid proposal (for $1.8 billion in new U.S. aid) like a bomb in the middle of the meeting. The poor Japanese thought they would finally get some peace and quiet after they announced their aid package, but we upped the ante.”

The Administration pressed the allies to contribute to a U.S.-proposed $4-billion fund to help turn Russia’s giant state-run industries into viable private businesses, and asked for responses by July’s G-7 meeting.

The United States is contributing $500 million to the fund, but it is relying on the others to add considerably more.

So the Administration has resorted to an age-old technique of charity fund-raisers: shame. By setting public targets and public deadlines, the Americans hope to embarrass Japan, Germany and other wealthy countries into loosening their purses.

The roots of the allies’ reluctance to pony up the money are not just economic. With the end of the Cold War and the melting of the perceived Soviet threat, there are now divergent definitions of bottom-line national interests when it comes to Russia.

The Germans have already spent more than $40 billion in this arena, with much of it to subsidize Russia’s removal of its troops from eastern Germany.

At the same time, the costs of unification--subsidizing the eastern part of the country--have put Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government under severe political pressure from citizens unhappy with climbing tax bills and inflation to which they are unaccustomed. So, Waigel left no doubt that his government is not interested in pledging any more.

And Japan, which announced its own $1.8-billion program of Russian aid just as the conference got under way, has its own problems, both over funneling yen to Russia and over a sore point in Japanese-Russian relations dating back to the end of World War II.

It is still struggling to climb out of the second-worst recession in its postwar history, and it made a point of stressing that its new assistance for Russia does not in any way limit its desire to gain the return of four northern islands captured by Moscow at the end of the war.