NEWS ANALYSIS : Peace Dividends Guide Postwar Relations : Vietnam: Rapprochement may have been so long in coming because of the absence of any potential rewards.

In taking the first step this week toward normal relations with Vietnam, President Clinton has struggled with a dilemma as old as war itself: how to reconcile with a former battlefield enemy.

For combatants at any point in human history, the path from the end of war to the beginning of peace has rarely been smooth. And yet nations repeatedly have made the journey--sometimes reluctantly, often ambivalently, almost always in pursuit of a newly defined national goal, like the economic opportunities Vietnam now presents to U.S. business.

History records exceptions, of course: Rome settled the third Punic War in 146 BC by razing the city of Carthage, enslaving all 50,000 of its residents and sowing the earth with salt.

But more typically, even nations that have bled each other dry in wartime--France and Germany in both World Wars, China and Japan in World War II--eventually find ways to put the past behind them and resume active relations with the former foe, more often sooner than later. Less than five years after Adolf Hitler’s army was driven from Paris in August, 1944, France and Germany were sworn to each other’s defense as charter members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

By those historic standards, many analysts consider the 19 years it has taken the United States and Vietnam to resume even commercial relations excessive. “The probability is that this (delay) will be seen as a very unusual event in the history of diplomatic relations,” said Yale University historian Paul M. Kennedy, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”

History suggests that the most difficult wars to move past are those that divided a nation at home. Consider the case of the reconciliation-minded group of Confederate veterans who sought to raise funds for a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general who later served as President, in Richmond 37 years after the Civil War’s end. “The fund,” writes historian Michael Kammen, “fizzled at $16.”

More recently, the closest parallel to America’s lingering agonies over Vietnam may be France’s efforts to come to terms with its former colony in Algeria.

After more than 100 years of colonial control, an uprising by Algerian nationalists beginning in 1954 sparked a bloody war that bitterly divided France and eventually forced Charles de Gaulle to negotiate independence for Algeria in 1962. Although the result was--like the Vietnam War for America--a tremendous blow to national esteem, the French government immediately recognized its former colony and made it the largest recipient of French foreign aid.

“De Gaulle was absolutely determined to make Franco-Algerian cooperation a model for post-colonial connections,” said Stanley Hoffmann, chairman of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

The result, though, has been more ambiguous. At the government level, while never suffering the “deep freeze” that has characterized U.S.-Vietnamese relations, France and Algeria have frequently squabbled over issues such as oil and immigration, Hoffmann said. Today, France appears torn over how to respond to a violent insurrection by Islamic militants against Algeria’s military-backed junta.

At the social level, relationships between the two countries “didn’t exist,” said Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute for International Relations in Paris. “That has been a very difficult reconciliation process, because the French are not entirely reconciled with their own history in Algeria. The process is not only reconciliation with the other but yourself. The French have still not come to terms with what we did wrong.”

That psychological struggle may be the point at which the French experience in Algeria most precisely illuminates the American anguish over Vietnam.

If there is one constant to this process of peace-making in modern times, it is that nations have moved quickly to repair relations when they had a compelling reason to do so and let animosities fester when they did not. In determining the pace of reconciliation, assessments of future gains consistently seem to exert more influence than resentments over past losses.

Put another way, it is not the ferocity of the war but the potential benefits of the peace that guides how quickly nations bury their differences.

“The natural impulse,” said Robert Dallek, a diplomatic historian at UCLA, “is to consult your interest.”

Seen through this lens, many believe that a principal reason for the long gap in relations with Vietnam may have been the absence, until recently, of an irresistible reason to move faster--especially given the fear among officials that moving to a normal relationship would provoke recriminations from Americans still angry over the issues that made the war so bitterly divisive.

“Because there was no overriding imperative to do this and there were all these other negative factors, there was perceived to be no reason to push it,” said Asia scholar Alan Romberg, director of research at the U.S. Institute for Peace, an independent federal institution.

This hard-headed assessment of costs and benefits fits the tradition of postwar rapprochement in modern times.

Before the 20th Century, the major European powers displayed a bifurcated approach to reconciliation, said Paul Kennedy, who has studied the evolution of great power relations. Generally, the major European powers--among them Britain, France, Prussia and Russia--believed that cultural, racial and religious differences precluded lasting reconciliation after war with nations such as the Ottoman Empire that were outside “the concert of Europe,” Kennedy said.

But in their dealings with each other during that period, the great powers changed partners from war to war as casually as dancers at a ball. “There was the assumption that national interest prevailed and you shouldn’t have the hang-up of worrying about who you fought with in the last war,” Kennedy said.

In 1848, British Foreign Secretary (and later Prime Minister) Lord Palmerston turned this sentiment into an enduring epigram: “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and these interests it is our duty to follow.”

In the 20th Century, the divide in attitudes toward reconciliation with Western and non-Western powers has not held as firmly. But Palmerston’s compass continued to guide the process of making peace with old enemies, with states again placing primary weight on calculations of national self-interest rather than revenge or contrition.

Thus, after World War I, fear of a renascent Germany led the French to pursue peace terms aimed at crippling its rival. But the United States and eventually Great Britain saw Germany as a potential bulwark against rising Soviet power and ultimately sought to bolster the defeated Germans by lightening the load of reparations.

After World War II, a different calculation of national interest dictated an even swifter American reconciliation with Germany and Japan, even though U.S. losses were far greater than in World War I and the barbarism exhibited by the defeated nations had been as savage as any in recorded history. Moreover, almost 80,000 U.S. soldiers remained missing in action at the end of World War II, compared to about 2,300 in Vietnam.

And yet, with the Cold War looming, those natural resentments were chaff in the search for allies against the Communist states. “At that time, we in the United States thought it was to our interest to have Germany and Japan on our side rather than leaving them to the Russian side,” said veteran U.S. diplomat Paul H. Nitze. “There was just a perfectly obvious competition for both sides to pick up the pieces.”

Japan behaved no differently after its defeat. Through the 1960s, Japan bristled at the U.S. refusal to allow it to resume relations with China and eagerly pursued closer economic ties with its giant neighbor. But at the same time, it took enormous American pressure on Japan and South Korea--nations with less lucrative stakes in reconciliation--to compel them to resume formal relations in 1965, 20 years after Korea was liberated from Japanese control.

“With China, the Japanese had a real requirement from their point of view to put things on a more normal basis,” Romberg said. “Korea does not loom as large for Japan, therefore the imperative to move toward (reconciliation) was not as great.”

Similarly, In the case of the United States and Vietnam, the absence of great strategic or economic interest in reconciliation--at least until recently--has clearly slowed the process. But, as with the French in Algeria, other factors were also in play.

But to most analysts, tangible concerns have influenced relations between the two nations less than the war’s psychological legacy. Although Americans actually have expressed relatively little lingering animosity toward the Vietnamese--even in the movie “Rambo,” the Vietnamese still holding U.S. servicemen are only fronts for the Soviets--the divisions within America about the war remain lacerating after two decades.

Thus, many believe that one critical reason the United States has deferred the question of how to deal with Vietnam is reluctance to reopen the debate over what went wrong there in the first place.

In the end, that reluctance to disturb old wounds appears to have been swept away primarily by a modern reinterpretation of Palmerston’s rule: the fear of losing Vietnam as a potential ally, not in a military sense but rather in global economic competition. Ethnic tensions, like those on bloody display in the former Yugoslav federation, appear immune to that calculus. But, for most nations, the sort of division that long separated the United States and Vietnam may be rendered increasingly anachronistic by the economic forces that finally forced them together.

“Countries have more immediate impact on each other than they used to, particularly as the economic barriers come down,” Romberg said. “The changes in the way nations and people interact are pushing people in the direction of (quicker) reconciliation.”