Next, a Cold Peace?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Perhaps there should have been no shock. Long before last week's meeting in Budapest of the 53-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, there had been abundant warnings that U.S.-Russian relations were turning sour. Russian officials had tried unsuccessfully to get the U.S.-designed embargo on Iraq's oil sales lifted and had resurrected Moscow's veto in the U.N. Security Council to block an American-backed resolution on Bosnia.

Shortly before the CSCE summit began, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev refused to go through with the scheduled signing of documents to create loose military ties between Russia and the U.S.-led NATO alliance.

But the exchanges in Budapest joltingly escalated the tensions to the heads- of-state level. This time it was Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin who dropped the big-grin, buddy-buddy act of their previous six face-to-face meetings and traded barbs. Clinton chided Russia indirectly for opposing NATO's plans to define the criteria for admitting Moscow's former satellites Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary by the end of 1995. NATO is the "bedrock" of European security, said Clinton, and expanding it will make "new members, old members and nonmembers" safer. And if Russia thinks otherwise? Well, tough. "No country outside will be allowed to veto expansion."

Yeltsin responded by voicing fear that Europe was about to split again into hostile blocs, this time consisting of everybody else vs. Russia. Expansion of NATO, in his view, would push what many Russians still see as an anti-Moscow alliance right up against the borders of the old Soviet Union. Said Yeltsin: "Europe, not having yet freed itself from the heritage of the cold war, is in danger of plunging into a cold peace. Why sow the seeds of mistrust?" The Russian President also accused Washington of overweening arrogance in playing the role of sole superpower. In his words, "It is a dangerous delusion to suppose that the destinies of continents and the world community in general can somehow be managed from one single capital."

U.S.-Russian wrangling helped keep the CSCE from reaching any agreement on what to do about the war in Bosnia. Russia, which sympathizes with Bosnia's Orthodox Serbs, blocked a proposal to condemn Serb attacks on the Muslim enclave of Bihac. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl suggested a bland appeal for a truce, but even that failed.

At week's end, to placate doubting allies, the Clinton Administration expressed a willingness to put U.S. combat troops into Bosnia, possibly as many as 25,000. But the pledge came festooned with important maybes: the troops would go in only to help the 19-nation U.N. peacekeeping force withdraw, and then only if the blue helmets came under attack and had to shoot their way out -- and even then only after "consultation" with a very unenthusiastic Congress. But even a remote possibility of American G.I.s shooting at Bosnian Serbs will hardly help ease the irritation between Washington and Moscow.

Those tensions are not the whole story of U.S.-Russian relations. After their testy exchange last week, Clinton and Yeltsin reconvened at a ceremony that formally put into effect the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty. Under terms negotiated in 1991, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan will destroy all their nuclear warheads, while the U.S. and Russia will greatly reduce the numbers they possess. The fact that the ceremony went almost unnoticed testifies to how effectively Washington and Moscow have worked to dispel the once rampant dread of nuclear holocaust. On a lower level, Yevgeni Kozhokin, director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, points out that thousands of ordinary Americans and Russians are working together every day on various projects and that "that's a new factor for stability that never existed before." Vice President Al Gore is flying to Moscow this week for a scheduled meeting with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin at which some soothing will probably go on.

Nonetheless, the tensions are real and not to be dismissed as mere mouthings by Yeltsin to appeal to nationalist sentiment at home. The very fact that Washington bashing is increasingly popular will make it tempting for Yeltsin to do more and more of it -- especially since his prospects of being re- elected in 1996 currently seem as shaky as Clinton's. In one recent poll, Russians were asked whether they would rather live in the "state system" headed by Yeltsin or in the one ruled by the late Leonid Brezhnev, whose leadership of the Soviet Union was long derided as the "period of stagnation." Brezhnev won, 46% to 28%.

Some of the frictions result simply because certain Russian national interests clash with U.S. policies. Russia has been trying to get the embargo on Iraqi oil sales lifted because the oil revenue is the only way Iraq can pay for arms it buys from the old U.S.S.R., and Moscow needs the money. Financial pressure also underlies Moscow's insistence that any Western companies drilling for oil in Azerbaijan build a pipeline through Russia, a demand that has aborted some promising deals. The U.S. responded calmly to Yeltsin's announcement on Friday that he had authorized the army to use "all means at * the state's disposal" to bring the breakaway republic of Chechnya back into the Russian Federation. "The Chechnya question is a Russian internal matter," announced the State Department. But in some American -- especially Republican -- eyes, Russia's dispatch of "peacekeeping" troops to Tajikistan, Georgia and other now independent Soviet republics looks like an attempt to force them back under Moscow's rule. But Russians insist they have a legitimate interest, indeed a duty, to prevent disruption in neighboring countries.

The big problem is one of psychology. Despite, or because of, current military and economic weakness, Russians of every political opinion yearn to see their country once again treated as the great power it historically has been. Instead, they think, it is being brushed aside. Russian fears of an expanded NATO may be exaggerated but are not totally paranoid. Fear of Russia is indeed a factor driving Moscow's former satellites to seek full NATO membership. Russians tend to forget their country's long history of aggressive expansion under czars as well as commissars. Worse, Russians think the U.S. and other Western powers are reneging on an implied deal. Moscow has done much of what they wanted -- pulled its troops back from Central Europe and the Baltic states, for instance -- only to face continued exclusion from an alliance that now aims to include much of Europe.

The U.S.-Russia strains may get even worse when the new Republican Congress takes office. While the Clinton Administration has made friendship with Moscow a top foreign-policy priority, the conservatives who will run key committees are inclined to mistrust even a non-Communist Russia. In particular, some incoming congressional powers are likely to look on Russian financial aid with a jaundiced eye, believing -- with some reason -- that much of it has been stolen or misused. They may try either to cut the total, or to redirect some of it to Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. That would intensify another Russian grievance: that when it comes to aid, the U.S. and other Western countries talk big but deliver little.

Neither Russia nor the U.S. is so idiotic as to take any chance of reviving the cold war. In the midst of his blast during the CSCE meeting, Yeltsin took care to insist, "We are no longer enemies, but partners." But however one- sided his expression, there is a very real danger that what just a short time ago looked like a blossoming friendship will indeed degenerate into a mere cold peace.

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Moscow and Ann M. Simmons/Washington