President’s Europe Trip Takes On a New Mission : Diplomacy: Clinton leaves on visit that was planned to bolster ties. Instead, he must counter Russian nationalism.

President Clinton left late Saturday on his first official visit to Europe and Russia--a trip that was planned as a reaffirmation of transatlantic friendship but which has already changed to a more urgent mission: countering a new threat of Russian nationalism.

The unexpected strength of ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky in Russia’s parliamentary elections last month has frightened the nations of Eastern Europe, worried leaders of Western Europe and shaken Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s reformist government. Clinton himself told reporters last week, “I wouldn’t say it scares me--but it concerns me.”

As a result, a senior official said, Europe is heading into critical decisions--and possible crises--over “Russia’s fate . . . and whether (Eastern Europe) can look west with hope, rather than east with fear.”

The resurgence of Russian nationalism has abruptly turned a once-obscure argument over expanding the membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into a concrete debate over who would defend Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic if Moscow “goes bad.”

Indeed, with Poland and others pressing to be taken into NATO’s protective fold, Clinton faces the challenge of leading the first fundamental redesign of Western strategy on the Continent since Harry S. Truman and the Allies forged the doctrine of containment after World War II.

As a result, Clinton, who said last year that he wanted to refocus American foreign policy toward the economic riches of Asia, is finding that the nagging security problems of old Europe are demanding more time than expected.

“In this century . . . any time the United States has gotten away from or withdrawn from Europe, it has led to real trouble,” the President said last week. “So I want to reaffirm . . . the connection.”

The nine-day journey--Clinton’s third and longest trip outside the United States in almost a year in office--will also be his chance to try on the role of leader of the Free World in a way he has not before.

“Clinton has not acted as the embodiment of American leadership in the world the way most presidents have in the last half-century,” historian Michael Beschloss noted. “He has focused like a laser on domestic affairs, as he promised he would. This trip gives him a chance to add another dimension to his exercise of leadership.”

The trip will take Clinton to five foreign cities: Brussels, site of NATO and European Union headquarters; Prague, capital of the Czech Republic; Moscow; Minsk, capital of the former Soviet republic of Belarus, and Geneva.

The President and his aides have outlined four main goals:

* Reaffirming American ties to Western Europe, a relationship that was badly damaged last year by disagreements over how to end the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and other issues.

* Selling an American proposal to bring Eastern European countries into closer military cooperation with NATO without explicitly promising them full membership in the alliance, which would commit the United States to defend them against any invasion--the “Partnership for Peace.”

* Bolstering Yeltsin, promoting continued economic reform in Russia, persuading Russia’s armed forces to seek international approval for their operations in neighboring republics--and making clear to Russia’s people that voting for Zhirinovsky, who plans to run for president, is a bad idea.

* Pursuing negotiations to dismantle all remaining Soviet nuclear weapons in Russia’s neighbors: Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

All four goals are entangled. The Western Europeans are worried about the future of Russia and the security of Eastern Europe. The Eastern Europeans want guarantees that the West will defend them if Russia ever again seeks to dominate its neighbors. The Russians want to be assured that NATO will not expand into a larger military pact aimed at hemming them in. And everyone is anxious about living next to an unstable Ukraine equipped with a nuclear arsenal.

The balancing act comes together in the Partnership for Peace, Clinton’s attempt at solving the riddle.

The problem arose last summer, when Polish President Lech Walesa began pressing NATO to invite the new democracies of Eastern Europe to become full members of the 44-year-old military alliance.

The Clinton Administration was initially sympathetic--but then discovered, belatedly, that such a move could inflame the fears of Russian military officers who grew up believing that NATO was a device to surround and strangle their homeland.

And, on reflection, the Administration realized that asking the American public to embrace a firm commitment to defend Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic--the most likely candidates for membership--was a political battle it was unsure it wanted to take on.

So the State Department proposed the Partnership for Peace, a Clintonesque compromise that promises something for everyone and hopes to offend no one.

It offers the Eastern Europeans a new relationship with NATO, to include joint military planning, new communications connections, joint exercises, some combined operations and the promise that “the door is open” for full membership in the alliance at some unspecified time, if everything works out.

The Russians, too, are offered a place in the partnership, to show the new structure is not aimed against them--although most officials say NATO membership for Russia is unlikely.

“It’s important to emphasize that we view it not as putting a limit on NATO membership, but as opening the door to fuller partnership,” Clinton said last week. “I think it clearly will lead, ultimately, to some more countries coming into NATO at some point in the future.”

The best outcome, he said, would be the evolution of a new security system that included Russia, producing “a Europe that is free of the dividing lines of the past, instead of just moving them a little bit further east.”

Meanwhile, Clinton said, the United States wants to avoid explicitly redrawing NATO’s defense line because of the possible reaction in Russia: “It would promote more insecurity than security.”

“It’s a balancing act,” explained Paul Cornish of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “The issue of NATO’s enlargement has come too soon. The one thing the Eastern Europeans want is a security guarantee. And that’s the one thing the West can’t give them. So there’ll be a compromise, a fudge.”

Rozanne Ridgway, a former assistant secretary of state in the Ronald Reagan Administration, observed: “This is pretty good--better than it looks at first glance. Under this plan, Poland can have a NATO partnership that’s pretty strong. . . . To make a more formal security guarantee work, you’d have to move American and German troops eastward into Poland--and that would be provocative and unnecessary.”

But other foreign policy experts, including former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, complain that the Partnership for Peace is needlessly vague and gives too much weight to Russian concerns.

“The Administration seems to be worried that extending NATO membership now would provoke Russian nationalism,” said Robert B. Zoellick, a former undersecretary of state in the George Bush Administration. “But that implicitly endorses the Russian extremists’ view that NATO is a threat. And what happens if Russia turns authoritarian? If the United States moves to extend NATO membership then, it would be more provocative than doing it now.”

In the end, officials say, the impact of the partnership will depend on what it turns out to be: a fast track to NATO membership, as the Clinton Administration promises, or a side track that further delays membership, as Walesa and other Eastern Europeans fear.

Walesa, Czech President Vaclav Havel and the other Eastern European leaders Clinton plans to meet this week all have indicated they will gladly accept the partnership offer but they will continue to press for more.

The jockeying over Eastern Europe has already had one positive effect, though: It has improved the relationships between the Administration and the nation’s traditional allies in Western Europe, which were badly frayed by disagreements over Bosnia last year.

Last May, Secretary of State Warren Christopher took the Europeans an American proposal to lift the international arms embargo from Bosnia--and they turned him down flat, a humiliating public setback. That soured the American relationships with Britain and France for months, and spilled over into other issues such as military cooperation in Somalia.

By most accounts, relations are better now--as long as the subject of Bosnia remains banished from the table. But Bosnia is almost certain to come up this week; French President Francois Mitterrand has threatened to ask the painful question of why NATO, which promised to intervene to prevent the “strangulation” of Sarajevo, has done nothing while Serbian forces have stepped up their shelling of civilian neighborhoods in the Bosnian capital.

In Russia, Clinton has a politically delicate task: explaining to leaders and citizens that the United States accepts Russian nationalism--but not the xenophobic, aggressive nationalism of Zhirinovsky, who has threatened to reconquer the lost lands of the Soviet Union; and pushing for continued economic reforms, while promising more Western attention to the idea of a “social safety net” to cushion the impact of closing huge, inefficient state-owned industries.

“This is a different Moscow than the one Clinton originally planned to visit,” said Dmitri Simes of Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Originally, he thought he would come in triumph on the heels of a Yeltsin victory in the parliamentary election.”

Aides say Clinton plans to make the limits of Western tolerance clear by refusing to meet with Zhirinovsky and by warning against xenophobia in a speech he is scheduled to give on Moscow television.

But he also hopes to strike a sympathetic note. “They should be given the opportunity to develop a new sense of their national purpose that is not aggressive and that permits them to be part of an integrated European political, economic and strategic system,” Clinton said.

In Moscow and Minsk, Clinton hopes to move forward in dismantling the remaining nuclear weapons of the former Soviet republics. The stop in Belarus is meant to reward that new nation for its willingness to surrender its atomic weapons to Russia.

But the real issue is Ukraine, which has about 1,800 nuclear warheads and has resisted making a commitment to give them all up.

The United States has offered hundreds of millions of dollars in economic aid as an incentive. Officials hope Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk will agree to sign a deal at a three-way summit session with Clinton and Yeltsin in Moscow.

Finally, in Geneva one week from today, Clinton is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Hafez Assad in an attempt to give a boost to Middle East peace negotiations. Israel has reached basic peace agreements with the Palestine Liberation Organization and Jordan. But Assad, who has demanded total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, has yet to signal readiness for a compromise.