NEWS ANALYSIS : President Employs Fear to Urge Support for East : Policy: Clinton raises specter of Russia’s collapse to caution America. He warns Europe chaos could spread.

President Clinton’s appeal Sunday for a new, post-Cold War partnership between the United States and Europe centered on two pointed messages of fear, one aimed at Americans and one at Europeans.

To Americans, Clinton issued a warning: The collapse of Russia or other East European democracies could draw the United States into war just as earlier crises pulled the nation into World War I and World War II.

To Europeans, he cast the warning in the form of a plea: Join the United States in stepping up aid and trade with the nations of the East, despite the pain of the recession now racking Western Europe, lest Russia’s chaos spread.

“For the peoples who broke communism’s chains, we now see a race between rejuvenation and despair,” Clinton warned, pitting “the heirs of the Enlightenment, who seek to consolidate freedom’s gain . . . (against) the grim pretenders to tyranny’s dark throne.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he added, must continue to defend the West as long as “the dream of empire still burns in the minds of some who look longingly toward a brutal past.”

His words were foreboding, and his tone was grim. But among the President’s aides, there was satisfaction. After a year of uncertainty, they believe that they have found a convincing new mission for the U.S.-European alliance: holding back the tide of nationalism in the troubled East.

Ironically, they owe that new clarity in part to Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist who surprised the West--and shook the East--with his unexpected strength in Russia’s parliamentary election last month.

Even before the election, Clinton and his aides had worked out a proposal to extend NATO’s defense cooperation gradually and gingerly into Eastern Europe, a plan they have dubbed the “Partnership for Peace.”

But to bring home his concern on Sunday, Clinton appeared to have taken the advice given President Harry S. Truman in 1947--that he should “scare hell out of the American people” to rally support for the “containment” of the Soviet Union.

Clinton’s aides said they intended this speech to be as historic as those Truman gave at the opening of the Cold War. “Five years from now, we hope this is remembered as the day the President defined a new security framework for Europe,” his national security adviser, Anthony Lake, said.

This time, Clinton said, the security of Western Europe and the United States must be protected by making sure that Russia and its neighbors succeed in their political and economic reforms--and by keeping NATO military defenses ready in case they fail.

“We want to prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” a senior Clinton aide said.

In a sense, it is a policy of “pre-containment”--of trying to ward off the rise of authoritarian rule in Moscow, and working to limit its effect in advance.

Will it work? For Clinton to succeed in matching Truman’s achievement, he must struggle against three obstacles.

One is the Europeans’ preoccupation with their own economic woes and a general lack of leadership on a continent of weak and aging governments. Germany, for example, which lies closest to Eastern Europe, complains that it has already spent almost $90 billion in aid to Russia and could stomach little more.

Another obstacle is the unpredictability of day-by-day events in Russia and its neighbors, caught up as they are in the throes of revolutionary economic and political change. Clinton called Sunday for something Presidents rarely extol: “humility--understanding that we cannot control every event in every country on every day.”

And a third is domestic: not the support of the American people, who by surprisingly large margins have backed continued U.S. aid to Russia, but Clinton’s own domestic agenda and its demands on his time and energy.

Until now, the President has refused to commit much time to foreign policy, except when compelled by crisis.

That damaged U.S. relations with European countries in 1993. “The transatlantic relationship just wasn’t tended the way it traditionally had been,” said Rozanne Ridgway, a former assistant secretary of state.