COLUMN ONE : The Ailing Atlantic Partnership : The ties that bind the U.S. and Europe are starting to fray. The Cold War threat has evaporated. Economic and cultural disputes have emerged. Such changes worry both leaders and small-town citizens.

When Mayor Wolfgang Hamberger thinks about the state of relations between Western Europe and the United States, what worries him is not friction over the value of the dollar, trade barriers or who’s to blame for not doing what in Bosnia.

Nor is it the way American soldiers behaved year after year in this town of baroque churches and gingerbread houses in the countryside 20 miles west of the old Iron Curtain; he insists they handled themselves remarkably well.

What haunts Hamberger is that the Americans are gone. And if he could listen to David Windley of Seymour, Ind., he would be more apprehensive still.

Windley, an accountant, served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War and traces his roots to the history and culture of Europe, as do most of the more than 16,500 people in his heartland town. But many of Seymour’s residents appear to have turned inward, focusing on domestic concerns. When they think about the larger world, it is likely to be Asia that attracts their attention.

“I think it’s pretty clear that my sons aren’t going to have the kind of fondness for Europe that my wife and I have had,” the 58-year-old Windley says.

Stories such as his, repeated from one end of America to the other, are troublesome not just for the mayor of a picturesque German city but also for Europe’s leaders and U.S. policy-makers. As Americans and Europeans prepare to celebrate on Monday the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, statesmen and citizens alike understand that the transatlantic relationship that carried them through the Cold War is in distress.

During the Cold War, America’s links with its European allies were virtually unquestioned on either side of the Atlantic: The Continent needed American might to protect it from a menacing Soviet Union, and the United States needed bases--and a massive military presence--in Europe to help stave off the Soviet threat.

But now Americans, tired of bearing the burdens of international leadership and worried about domestic issues such as crime, health care and uncertainties in the job market, are pondering whether the time has come to pull back from the U.S. role as a global superpower and channel more resources to the home front.

Europeans, finally freed from their dependence on U.S. military strength, have begun to resent openly the longstanding American “domination” of their economies and even their cultures.

As a result, the cement has begun to crack in America’s oldest, most successful overseas relationship. Beyond the rhetoric and expressions of wholehearted commitment, key strands in the ties that bind are loosening.

Yet on both sides of the Atlantic, there is also recognition of the value of the old relationship and the potential dangers if it unravels--not only in economic or strategic terms, but in other ways.

For instance, Seymour’s history and culture are bound up with Europe. More than half the city’s population is of German descent.

A weathered tank outside the low-slung veterans’ hall attests to locals’ service in World War II. Many of Seymour’s sons, like Windley, were stationed on the Continent during the Cold War. Windley himself came home with such fond memories that he took his family back to Frankfurt, where they spent five weeks visiting German friends he had met during his Army tour.

He laments that his children and grandchildren will not continue the tradition. With the draft long gone and the Cold War over, far fewer American soldiers serve in Europe today. As a result, almost none of Seymour’s young adults have had firsthand contact with Europeans.

Similarly, on the streets of Fulda, America seems farther away than it used to.

The town sits astride the route that Soviet troops would most likely have taken to invade Western Europe--the so-called Fulda Gap. American GIs arrived in April, 1945, and stayed for nearly half a century. But they departed in June, leaving an indefinable void that Fulda’s mayor insists worries him far more than the dent in the city’s economy.

“I doubt if we really know yet what it means for us that the Americans have gone,” Hamberger says. But of one thing he is certain: The new generation will never know Americans in the way his generation did, and that could be a serious loss.

When the U.S. Army’s 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment left, so did the German-American Contact Group, the German-American Women’s Club and the evenings at the regimental recreation center, where German young people tended to outnumber the Americans two to one.

“We never had the feeling that they were strangers,” the mayor said in a recent interview. “They were always part of the town.”

Why else, he asks, would townspeople have taken to the streets in early 1991 to support the Persian Gulf War, when peace protests rocked major German cities?

“The answer is easy,” he says. “To us, those Americans fighting in the Gulf were real people, with real faces and names that we knew. They were us.”

The Atlantic relationship is being buffeted by new crosswinds at every level.

The United States has withdrawn more than two-thirds of the 327,000 troops it had in Europe during the 1980s. President Clinton has pledged to keep 100,000 here permanently, but he is facing some pressures to withdraw even more.

Congress’ new GOP leadership wants to cut foreign aid and limit the President’s ability to ensnare the nation in foreign entanglements. Many lawmakers of Clinton’s own party share those views.

In a political system where power groups frequently coalesce around national origins, changing demographics have left America less ethnically European than it was 50 years ago. Although firm statistics are not available, the proportion of Americans claiming European ancestry has fallen sharply since World War II.

“There is no credible or relevant voice at the moment . . . calling for a continuation of a strong transatlantic partnership,” John Kornblum, a State Department official, said in a recent speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Other factors are at work.

Europeans, aware of these changes and free from their dependence on U.S. military might for their survival, are searching for ways to assume more responsibility.

They have also been distracted by other issues, including a deluge of immigrants from the Muslim world, a revival of the nationalist right and demands by Central Europeans for admission to the West European club.

As transatlantic affairs become more economic in nature, America increasingly is being viewed as more a competitor than an ally. In recent months, for example, Europe and the United States have locked horns on economic and cultural issues ranging from how long Hollywood should continue to dominate Europe’s movie fare to who should write the rules for the new World Trade Organization.

Some fear such disputes could gradually erode the relationship.

“We need to invest at least as much time and energy in the development of new economic architecture as we are doing in the restructuring of NATO,” warns Jeffrey E. Garten, the U.S. undersecretary of commerce. “This is not now the case, and we have no time to lose.”

Clashes have also occurred in other areas, such as how fast to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whether to lift the U.N. arms embargo against the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina and how far to allow Turkey to pursue Kurdish rebels into Iraq.

Robert M. Kimmitt, former undersecretary of state and now a managing director of Lehman Bros., argues that in some ways the United States is facing a turning point in its foreign policy, one similar to the situation it confronted immediately after World War II.

“The natural tendency was to return to our problems at home,” Kimmitt says, “but we had a group of people who realized that we must be strong and successful abroad. My sense is that we’re slipping back into a sort of zero-sum analysis--the kind that can give you trouble.”

With the defense issue the most overriding during much of the Cold War era, it is not surprising that one debate today centers on how big a role the United States should continue to play in providing for Europe’s security.

With Asia becoming an economic powerhouse and China emerging as a potential economic and military threat, many Americans are looking toward the Far East as the place where the United States should be concentrating its foreign policy interests.

Only last month, Michael Lind, a senior editor of Harper’s magazine, called for an “Asia-first” foreign policy aimed at maintaining the balance between Japan and China and forcing both countries to open their markets to more U.S. goods.

Clinton Administration strategists scoff at the notion of shifting to an Asia-first policy, but they concede that the idea of maintaining the old transatlantic relationship has lost much of the support that it enjoyed in Cold War days.

Those seeking to bolster U.S.-European ties argue that despite current difficulties, the link remains America’s single most important international relationship--in trade, in shared values and in defense:

* The United States still has vital geopolitical interests in Europe, from avoiding further intra-European fighting to keeping Germany from dominating the Continent to making sure that Russia does not intimidate the Europeans.

* Trade and investment between the United States and Europe make the Continent far and away America’s most important global economic partner. In 1993, they racked up a two-way trade of $224 billion--with an additional $500 billion in investment flows--accounting for 9.5 million jobs.

* Because of their countries’ common heritage, many Americans and Europeans have a set of shared values that transcend U.S. relationships with other regions: everything from the Judeo-Christian tradition to the ideas expressed in the Constitution.

The steady withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Continent--combined with stories that Americans are shifting their attention to domestic concerns--has set off a scramble among European officials to find new ways to reshape and revitalize the transatlantic link.

“Europe is inconceivable without America, and America inconceivable without Europe,” German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel declared last month during a goodwill visit to Chicago. “The United States and Europe must develop a shared vision for the 21st Century.”

Although the proposals differ substantially in the details, all would expand the relationship’s formal structures to embrace economic, political and cultural issues as well as security.

Kinkel, for example, called for a new transatlantic free-trade agreement, accompanied by a U.S.-European political and cultural compact, that would enable the two sides to coordinate policies on issues from Bosnia to combatting the drug trade.

Jacques Santer of Luxembourg, the new president of the European Union’s Executive Commission, wants a “transatlantic treaty” that would seek a single U.S.-European economic market.

German Defense Minister Volker Ruehe has proposed a “transatlantic covenant” that would expand the U.S.-European military partnership into a general problem-solving mechanism. His British counterpart, Malcolm Rifkind, favors widening the security arrangement into an “Atlantic community” based on common values and a shared cultural heritage--including exchange programs for legislators, business executives and civil servants.

Behind the flurry of such initiatives is a realization by European leaders of one compelling fact: After having depended on the United States for its security through much of World War II and the Cold War, the Continent is not prepared to go it alone.

Indeed, the Europeans’ first major attempt to deal with a home-grown security problem without American leadership--containing the civil war in Bosnia--has traumatized European capitals and has seriously eroded the region’s collective self-confidence.

“All of a sudden, Europeans found themselves without Big Brother’s guidance,” says Francois Heisbourg, former director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London and now a French defense industry executive. “They were lost.”

In many ways, the Balkan crisis has merely underscored what Europeans already know: In a post-Cold War world, they must shoulder much more of their own security burden.

In the meantime, the ties between the Seymours and the Fuldas have not all faded. In Fulda, near the empty former U.S. military base a mile west of the city center, Klaus Sorg, the local Ford dealer, recalls a visit to Orlando, Fla., a few years ago. For him, it captured the U.S.-European relationship in a snapshot.

Expecting a long series of inquiries at the airport checkpoint, Sorg was taken aback when the U.S. immigration officer asked him only one question: “How are things at the Carp?”--Fulda’s best-known hotel and restaurant.

“He’d served there as a soldier,” Sorg explains.

Pine reported from Seymour and Washington, Marshall from Fulda and Brussels. Researcher Isabelle Maelcamp of The Times’ Brussels Bureau also contributed to this report.

Next: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization--Where is it headed?