U.S. Analysts Puzzled Over Motive for Gorbachev’s Bid : Kremlin: Some cite his ego or Soviet desire to remain a major power. Failure could be politically costly.

WASHINGTON —  Concerned about the fate of Mikhail S. Gorbachev as a key element in future U.S.-Soviet relations, U.S. analysts say they are puzzled by the Soviet president’s attempt to play peacemaker in the Persian Gulf. The effort, fraught with pitfalls, risks his ties to the Western nations he needs to help rebuild his shattered economy, they say.

If he pushed too hard to accommodate Iraq, he risked alienating the United States, which is far more important to him than any foreign policy benefit he might win in the Middle East. And if his gambit was openly rebuffed by President Bush, his domestic critics could accuse him of demonstrating Soviet impotence virtually on its own borders in the new post-Cold War world.

“If Gorbachev pulls if off, it could be another Nobel Peace Prize,” said Arnold Horelick, senior Soviet expert at Santa Monica-based RAND Corp. “If he doesn’t, it could be another nail in his coffin.”

Experts on Soviet affairs, in and out of the government, offer varying speculations about Gorbachev’s motives. Most deal with domestic politics and a desire for his nation to remain an international presence.

But some have suggested that his ego may have been a factor. One analyst even conjectured that Bush and Gorbachev played a secret “bad cop-good cop” game to whipsaw Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein into defeat.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, apparently reflecting the Administration’s consensus, said Friday that the most compelling motives for Gorbachev’s attempts involve both Soviet domestic politics and Moscow’s long and close military relationship with Iraq.

The United States has “basically welcomed” his efforts, Cheney said, adding that he was “inclined to want to attribute only honorable motives to President Gorbachev.”

Expanding on the Soviet domestic motive, a senior Administration official said he saw Gorbachev’s intervention as a reaction primarily to conservatives who used the Gulf issue to attack all of his foreign policy, and who effectively extended their criticism to his domestic political and economic reforms as well.

The conservatives have decried Germany’s reunification, the loss of the former East European empire, and cuts in the Soviet military’s size and strength. And now in the Persian Gulf, they complained, the influence of this former nuclear superpower appeared only marginally important in the Middle East as Moscow went along with the U.S.-led initiatives to force Iraq out of Kuwait.

The Soviet military has opposed Soviet support of the U.N. resolutions against Iraq from the start, a senior U.S. analyst added. But “even some of the reformers in Moscow have been nervous about this course,” this official said.

Soviets on both the left and right support Gorbachev’s peace bid, he emphasized. No constituency supports the war.

Moreover, Moscow wants a voice in the Mideast settlement after Iraq’s defeat, the official said. Since the Soviet Union has no military role in the war, Gorbachev reportedly saw a mediating effort as the best chance to win a Soviet seat at the peace table, as well as regain influence more broadly in the Arab world.

Nongovernment experts take largely the same view, but with somewhat different emphasis.

“Gorbachev recognized from Day 1, when Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait, that this was bad for his leadership position,” said Stephen Cohen, a Princeton University Sovietologist.

Gorbachev knew that it would be impossible to reform the Soviet system when international tensions are high, Cohen said. Reforms risk destabilizing a society at any time, but they are particularly dangerous in time of foreign wars, especially those close to home.

The Gulf War gave Gorbachev’s enemies an issue to attack the Soviet leader’s “new thinking” across the board, Cohen said. It demonstrated that instead of international disputes being reconciled politically from now on, as Gorbachev predicted, military power remains central. In fact, not only were the United States and its allies using military might, but the long-term effect might be a permanent U.S. garrison less than 500 miles from Soviet territory.

“New thinking,” by extension, could be as wrong in domestic affairs as in foreign affairs, it was argued.

As one view of the issue’s potency in Soviet politics, Cohen contends that the Persian Gulf brought down former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

Apparently without first consulting Moscow, Shevardnadze joined Secretary of State James A. Baker III in immediately condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and calling for an Iraqi withdrawal, he said. And later, at the United Nations, Shevardnadze hinted that Moscow might also send troops to the region to oust Iraq, a position for which there was no support in Moscow, Cohen maintained.

Shevardnadze resigned in December, soon after returning from a trip to Washington. He did not cite any foreign policy disputes, however, but warned of the growing danger of dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s ego may have also been a factor in his peace overture, according to RAND’s Horelick, who was once the CIA’s top Soviet analyst.

“The mediating role is one that Gorbachev sees for himself, and his country, along the India-Pakistan pattern,” Horelick said, referring to the mid-1970s, when then-Prime Minister Alexei A. Kosygin brokered a cease-fire between those Asian nations.

Analysts are even more puzzled by the way in which Gorbachev chose to act. He apparently went off on his own, presenting his settlement package to Baghdad without Washington’s approval. Depending on how Iraq responded, Horelick said, Gorbachev might have found himself in a box.

Gorbachev’s course of action put him in a position where he might have to chose between supporting Iraq after it accepted his initial proposal, thereby seriously damaging U.S.-Soviet relations, or return “as gracefully as possible” to back the U.S.-led coalition, Horelick said. Returning to the coalition would have “showed his real impotence,” Horelick added, and could have significantly damaged his political standing in the Soviet Union.

Horelick said one possibility is that Gorbachev and Bush put on a good cop-bad cop play, with the Soviet leader acting as the nice guy with his proposals, letting Bush slap down each concession in order to get ultimate surrender.

But Gorbachev’s spokesman, Vitaly N. Ignatenko, suggested at a Moscow press conference Friday that while a “real partnership” exists between the two nations, such a ploy was virtually inconceivable.

The Bush Administration and Bush personally were “understanding” of Gorbachev’s efforts, Ignatenko said.

“Since the inception of the crisis in the Persian Gulf,” he stressed, “the Soviet Union and the United States have acted always in harmony with regard for the interests of each other.”

However, Ignatenko tried to downplay the role of both the Soviet Union and United States.

“The proposals introduced by the Soviet Union . . . and the U.S. proposals and suggestions which are to come, will have one single address,” he said. “They should be addressed to the United Nations, which will discuss this problem and will pass its verdict in conjunction with the entire international community.”