Can U.S. Reassume Role of Europe’s Father Figure? : Diplomacy: The European family appears dysfunctional. And the most troublesome adolescents are disinclined to believe that Daddy knows best.

Bill Clinton enters this week on his uncomfortable inheritance as the father-figure for the dysfunctional European family.

U.S. Presidents have always had to treat the Western European allies as a particularly troublesome adolescent--big and strong enough to stand on its own feet, but still needing the assurance of paternal control.

Now the European family has widened to include the frightened children of Eastern Europe, huddling for NATO’s protection against their age-old fears of the Russian bogey man. And in Russia, the United States is taking responsibility for an autistic young adult, potentially powerful, but terrifyingly unpredictable, barely in control and still unformed.

Clinton got to the White House by attacking George Bush as “a foreign-policy President” who did too little for Americans at home. Now he arrives in Europe today for the most important foreign trip of his presidency so far, believing that much of his domestic agenda depends on his ability to calm and stabilize a Europe that some of his advisers fear is unraveling.

This is not just the unending war in Bosnia--itself a standing denunciation of any grandiose plans for a new North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission. But the dangerous and new equation is plain enough. Most of Clinton’s plans for domestic U.S. reform--and his hopes for a quiescent international scene--depend on Russia’s orderly transition to a free-market democracy.

From the anticipated savings in the U.S. defense budget to maintaining the U.N. Security Council consensus, the United States has grown accustomed to Russia as a partner rather than a rival, and Clinton’s worst fear would be any revival of the old Cold War antagonisms.

At the same time, relations with the traditional NATO allies of Western Europe are ragged, bruised by the arguments over Bosnia and the hard-fought compromise over world trade in the General Agreement Tariffs and Trade.

“It’s hand-holding time again for Europe,” sighed one senior State Department official last week. “A lot of us thought that the end of the Cold War meant we would not have to play the psychological role of Daddy again. But the Europeans still need their American comfort blanket, and I guess we have to remind America that the stability of Europe is a vital U.S. strategic interest.”

So Clinton leaves with a four-part agenda: to mollify his European allies; to revitalize NATO; to reassure the worried Eastern Europeans, and to chart the West’s relations with the problematic new Russia that is emerging after last month’s parliamentary elections.

As a result, Clinton’s first voyage across the Atlantic since taking office is three parts symbolism to one part substance. But the one substantial new policy he brings is of crucial importance to all the rest: His new compromise new proposal for the future of NATO.

Dubbed “Partnership for Peace,” this plan seeks to offer Hungary, Poland and the Czech and Slovak Republics a kind of country membership of NATO, a structure for cooperation pointedly designed to fend off Russian fears of isolation by extending the NATO alliance up to Russia’s borders.

This is a highly contentious proposal, which has left Poland’s Lech Walesa warning that without a firm NATO military umbrella, Eastern Europe could face “a major tragedy--another Yugoslavia.” And back in the United States, a fractious debate has begun over the new foreign-policy priority of doing nothing which could complicate Boris N. Yeltsin’s relations with his generals, or provoke nationalist sentiment in Russia.

Strobe Talbott, just nominated to be the new deputy Secretary of State, while maintaining his stewardship of policies toward Russia and the former Soviet republics, is the main author of this policy. His long friendship with Clinton gives him unrivaled access and influence with the President.

Talbott believes that keeping Russia on track toward a free-market democracy, and as a cooperative partner in world affairs, is such a central U.S. strategic interest that other issues, from Eastern Europe to the increasing assertiveness of Russia toward its “near abroad,” must take second place.

“Partnership For Peace”--known to the diplomatic world as P4P--is almost certain to be approved by the NATO summit. The European allies are so relieved to be back on top of the U.S. agenda, after the Asian flirtations of Clinton’s first year, that they are silencing their doubts. Any sign of firm U.S. leadership for NATO, the British and Germans agree, is better than last year’s casual dismissal by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher that U.S. policy had been “too Eurocentric for too long.”

After smoothing ruffled feathers of the Western Europeans at the NATO summit in Brussels, the White House plan trusts the Eastern Europeans will be reassured by their meeting with Clinton on his next stop, in Prague. U.S. diplomats have been warning Prague, Budapest and Warsaw not to complain too loudly about “Partnership for Peace,” or they could jeopardize even that limited NATO embrace.

Clinton will stress to Presidents Vaclav Havel and Walesa that “the angel is in the details”--and that P4P’s program of joint military exercises and training represents a back door into eventual NATO membership. But he will emphasize that, in this crucial transition period in Russia, it is in the interests of Eastern Europe as well as NATO not to alarm the Russian military and its nationalists that a new defensive line is being drawn through Europe.

In Moscow, Clinton will stress his continued commitment to Yeltsin in person, and to the process of Russian reform in general, and has no plans to meet the leader of the extreme nationalist party, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky. He will also try to rebuild the consensus among Russia, the G-7 Western nations and the international finance institutions--the World Bank and International Monetary Fund--about the strategy of Western support for Russian reform.

In the wake of Russia’s elections, interpreted by Yeltsin and in Washington as a protest vote against the social costs of economic reform, Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and Talbott all said the West should help bring “more therapy and less shock” to the process of Russia’s transition to a free-market economy.

But Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, who also travels to Russia this month, agrees with the Europeans, the World Bank and the IMF that a country with 15%-20% inflation each month can hardly be said to have been hit by the shock therapy of full-blooded economic reform.

A compromise is likely, if it can be agreed in talks with Yeltsin, under which the West might marginally relax its conditions on Russian inflation rates to provide more funds to stabilize the currency and help build a social safety net for the poor and unemployed. In return, Russia’s central bank would have to clamp down on its monetary supply, and recent Russian controls on the access of foreign banks and foreign investors to the Russian economy would have to be eased.

Privately, the Clinton Administration is calling this its “Year of Europe”--though the use of this phrase, which offended Europeans when Henry A. Kissinger coined it in 1974, is banned. American irritation with Europe’s periodic fits of vapors is understandable enough, when Europeans whimper for America’s paternal attention and then fret rebelliously when Big Daddy rubs it in.

By the end of this year, Europe should have sufficient U.S. attention to start complaining about it again. There will be three more presidential visits across the Atlantic after this one.

By then, NATO and the Eastern Europeans should be content with all this presidential quality time. But across what is emerging as Europe’s de facto new frontier in Russia, the autistic orphan may well be fractious and threatening enough to resume Moscow’s old strategic role as the threat binding the rest of Europe and America together. If so, Europe will expect delays in Clinton’s desired defense cuts. A big stick is required to play the role of Big Daddy.