NEWS ANALYSIS : Limited Mandate May Handcuff U.S. Troops in Macedonia : Balkans: U.N. orders could relegate first American ground troops to the role of spectators.

Fresh from their victory in the 40-year-old standoff between East and West, 300 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Berlin Brigade are coming here on a mission to stare down one of the greatest threats of the post-Cold War era.

While the watchful presence of U.S. troops and their impressive array of military hardware caused communism to blink first in the protracted face-off with Western democracy, it is an open question whether the mere reputation of the U.S. forces will be enough to halt the spread of the Balkan war.

Like 25,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops who have come before them to the Yugoslav successor states, the Americans may find themselves handcuffed by a mission mandate that relegates them to the role of spectators.

The Clinton Administration announced last month that it would send combat-ready troops to Macedonia, America’s first contribution to the U.N. ground forces deployed amid the worst fighting in Europe since World War II. The move was seen as a White House attempt to play a more active role in the largest peacekeeping mission in U.N. history while possibly deterring the Balkan combatants from spreading their conflict south.

But because the newly assigned troops are from the world’s sole surviving superpower and Washington has often warned that it will not allow Serbs to apply their reviled practice of “ethnic cleansing” to the neighboring Serbian province of Kosovo, some see the U.S. deployment here as a springboard for intervention.

Macedonia’s 2 million people seem mostly pleased with the display of protection. But many wonder whether U.S. involvement will do more to spotlight their vulnerability than it will to reduce it.

“People here were initially worried that anywhere (the U.N. force) goes, war follows,” said Alan Roberts, spokesman for the U.N. mission in Macedonia. “We’re getting across the idea that nothing is really happening, and people are beginning to accept that we are what we say we are, a deterrent.”

While officials here recognize that the U.S. troops and 700 Scandinavian soldiers already stationed in Macedonia have severely limited orders--to monitor the border, write reports and use weapons only in self-defense--they are confident that the troops’ role will be expanded if trouble breaks out.

“Right now it is more symbolic and psychological,” Deputy Foreign Minister Risto Nikovski said of the U.S. deployment. “But having 300 Americans here is also an obligation for the United States.”

Macedonians’ biggest fear is that the Balkan war will soon spread to Kosovo, where Belgrade authorities have stripped the 90% ethnic Albanian majority of self-rule and imposed a police state.

If social unrest sweeps Serbia as a result of the grinding poverty brought on by two years of conflict, any one of a number of power-hungry warlords could trigger ethnic violence in Kosovo.

Any Serbian attack on the unarmed Albanians in Kosovo would lure neighboring Albania in to defend them, as well as many of the ethnic Albanians who make up as much as 40% of Macedonia’s population. “In that case, Macedonia will have a lot of refugees and it will become part of the conflict, even against its will,” Deputy Defense Minister Todor Malezanski predicted.

Macedonian leaders and U.N. officers alike are uncertain what calming influence the foreign troops could have in such circumstances; the U.N. forces’ mandate makes no allowance for help in closing the border to destabilizing population flows or support for Macedonia’s 15,000 poorly armed soldiers in driving back invaders.

Even the procedures for strengthening the mission in the event of a disastrous spread of the conflict appear doomed to plod through days, if not weeks, of U.N. bureaucracy. The U.N. resolution endorsing the expansion into Macedonia requires any appeal for more troops or a more forceful mandate to be addressed to the Security Council, rather than providing the option of drawing on the U.N. forces already there.

Still, the government of this landlocked country not yet recognized by the United States believes that the U.S. presence is a warning to Serbia that it could face forceful U.S. retaliation if Kosovo or Macedonia comes under attack.

But diplomats here and in the Serbian capital of Belgrade speculate that the U.S. deployment is a diversionary, face-saving move after the White House retreated from the risky military measures in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Maj. Guy Shields, who accompanied an advance party of logistics and communications troops to Skopje in late June, insisted that the Americans are simply an expansion of the existing border-monitoring force and will be subject to the orders and priorities worked out by the Danish commander for Macedonia, Gen. Finn Thomsen.

Most of the soldiers, expected to be deployed by mid-July, are being transferred from a light infantry company of the Berlin Brigade, which has been made largely redundant by the diminished threat from Eastern Europe.