Strains in Western Alliance Evident at Policy Gathering : NATO: Diplomats from Europe stress need for U.S. protection. Americans say public support is waning.

MUNICH, Germany — Against a backdrop of growing concern about the health of America’s most successful security alliance, leaders from several European nations Saturday called for a broader U.S. commitment to defending the Continent against new threats.

“Given the instability in Eastern Europe, we need the strategic backing of America,” declared German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe.

But as Ruehe sketched “a new, wider ‘transatlantic contract,’ ” and as others, such as French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, called for a strengthened U.S.-European security “partnership of equals,” a chorus of respected voices in the field of American foreign policy sharply warned of waning U.S. public support for defending the Old World.

“It is clear that we have entered a new world of disorder, and our inability to formulate either coherent policies or strategies to deal with ethnic conflicts and NATO expansion has led to a cross-Atlantic fear, confusion, incoherence and recrimination,” declared Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.), a senior figure on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Added Richard Burt, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, “Atlanticism as a political-military strategy is dying.”

The exchanges came during the opening session of the 32nd annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, a privately organized gathering of about 200 military and security policy-makers from the United States and Europe that has evolved over the years into a forum of unusually candid exchanges on sensitive issues.

U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry is scheduled to address the conference today.

Saturday’s discussions in Munich unfolded 50 years to the day after a higher-level group of political leaders met in the Crimean resort of Yalta to decide the fate of post-World War II Europe.

In that historic weeklong meeting, an ailing U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill effectively ceded much of Central Europe, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in return for Stalin’s pledge to enter the war against Japan.

The collapse in 1989 of the divided Europe created at Yalta brought freedom to millions but also generated new strains in transatlantic affairs.

In one respect, Saturday’s session underscored how far apart West European and American perceptions of NATO have drifted since the end of the Cold War.

Officially, the United States remains fully committed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It has even surpassed its European partners in urging a rapid expansion of the alliance to include such countries as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. This would give the former Communist nations NATO’s coveted security guarantees, which judge an attack on one member state to be an attack on them all.

However, the collapse of communism and the proliferation of messy, little-understood ethnic conflicts such as the one in Bosnia-Herzegovina have reduced American enthusiasm about becoming involved in European problems that seem to have little to do with U.S. strategic interests.

Differences over Bosnia that have previously divided the United States and its European allies resurfaced Saturday, with Cohen demanding tougher action.

The senator said that Yasushi Akashi, the controversial U.N. special envoy in the former Yugoslav federation, should be fired, that U.N. peacekeepers should be more heavily armed, and that they should be allowed to strike back at anyone interfering with their work.

Akashi has been criticized as being too timid to order NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serbs who ignore U.N. resolutions or fire at U.N. peacekeepers.

“If we’re unable to give the United Nations Protection Force (what it needs to carry out its mission), we should remove those forces before the U.N. political impotence is allowed to erode NATO’s military integrity and credibility any more than it already has,” Cohen said.

By contrast, British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind spoke of the positive changes that have occurred over the past year in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, and stated, “I hope our friends in the Congress think very, very hard about the practical consequences of lifting the embargo (against selling arms to the Muslim-led government) and a U.N. withdrawal.”

Rifkind called for a greater dialogue between Congress and politicians in Europe.

“With the end of the Cold War, NATO and defense issues remain too narrow a shoulder to bear the whole Atlantic relationship,” he added.