THE BOSNIA DILEMMA : U.S. to Seek NATO Allies’ Support for Beefed-Up Threats Against Serbs : Military: Policy would include wider air strikes as well as tougher sanctions. It depends on assent from Europeans, Russians.

The Clinton Administration will seek European and Russian support for new military and diplomatic pressure against Serbian forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including wider air strikes against military targets and stiffer economic sanctions against Belgrade, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

Administration officials hope that a new series of threats and a tightening of the economic screw will induce the Bosnian Serbs to forfeit territory won by force and return to the bargaining table.

So far, the Bosnian Serbs--with support from their staunch allies in Serbia--have not been intimidated by limited North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes and have repeatedly broken diplomatic promises to cease assaults on Bosnian Muslims.

The new Administration policy, like all of its previous policies, depends on allied assent to the use of broad military power and goodwill on the part of the Bosnian Serbs, conditions that have proven elusive despite 15 months of effort.

The key to the latest Administration proposal, announced after three hours of White House meetings among Clinton and his top foreign policy advisers, appears to be an increased willingness by Moscow to lean heavily on its traditional Serbian allies to withdraw from the besieged town of Gorazde and abide by cease-fire agreements elsewhere in Bosnia.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on Monday asked the United States and its NATO allies to prepare to deliver a series of air attacks on Bosnian Serb targets in the wake of the assault on Gorazde, one of six Bosnian Muslim towns declared safe areas by the United Nations last spring.

A senior official said the new Administration proposal will be “responsive” to Boutros-Ghali’s request for increased use of force in Bosnia but will also seek European and Russian participation in a diplomatic initiative designed to quell the conflict in the former Yugoslav federation.

“It is very important here that we combine the military and power relationships on the ground with the diplomatic (initiatives),” said a senior Administration official, trying to portray the latest Bosnia policy as more muscular than its previous incarnations.

“The use of power without diplomatic ends is purposeless, and the use of diplomacy without power will fail,” the official added.

Another foreign policy official said the immediate focus will be to pressure or punish Bosnian Serb forces to force them to lift the siege of Gorazde, which is jammed with vulnerable Bosnian Muslim refugees from the surrounding countryside. Gorazde was essentially in Serbian control on Tuesday, and a State Department official described conditions there as “awful.”

If the siege is lifted, Washington then hopes to establish an “exclusion zone” around the city that would force the Bosnian Serbs to withdraw all guns to a safe distance and to allow aid convoys into the city, as was done around Sarajevo earlier this year.

The protections would then be extended to other safe areas--the Bosnian towns of Tuzla, Srebrenica, Bihac and Zepa.

A senior American official summarized the Clinton proposal as including two parts: a beefed-up military plan to protect the safe areas coupled with a diplomatic effort to get the negotiations going. He said there is also “an effort to get Serbia to focus on its responsibilities. We’re hoping the Russians will help on that.”

The plan includes a major effort to pressure the Bosnian Serbs to release the more than 100 U.N. peacekeepers they have detained. One option, according to a U.S. official, is to warn the leaders of Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs that the West will hold them personally responsible for the fate of the detained peacekeepers.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher began contacting top allied and Russian officials Tuesday night to outline the Administration proposal. Christopher might travel to Europe next week to try to restart the stalled Bosnian peace talks.

NATO ambassadors were to take up the American plan beginning this morning in Brussels; the United States also will discuss with its major allies and Russia whether to hold an international conference at a higher level.

Clinton said in a brief statement that he was encouraged by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s tougher tone in discussing the behavior of the Bosnian Serbs. Yeltsin also proposed a high-level meeting to urgently address the political and humanitarian disaster in Bosnia.

“I presume from his statement today that he’s sufficiently concerned about what’s happened in the last couple of days (in Gorazde) that he thinks maybe we ought to go ahead and do it now,” Clinton said. “I think it deserves serious consideration, and I want to discuss it with him and with the other nations that would be involved.”

Clinton, mindful of the failure of past policy proposals from Washington, also said, “We simply must not be on record in favor of any policy we are not prepared to follow through on.”

The tenor of Tuesday’s exchanges seemed to reflect two bedrock American principles: There will be no unilateral American military action against Serbia or the Bosnian Serbs, and there will be no commitment of U.S. ground forces until there is an enforceable peace agreement among all the warring parties.

Clinton appears to be willing to risk a handful of American pilots in a stepped-up air campaign against the Bosnian Serbs but has no stomach--and little political or public support--for the use of U.S. infantry. The American public narrowly supports the use of air power in Bosnia but overwhelmingly opposes the dispatch of ground troops.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this report.