U.S. Must Sever the Ties That Bind It to Gorbachev : Soviet Union: The Russian leader is likely to be more a symbol than a power. Policy tied to his fate risks putting Bush on the wrong side.

All democratic leaders--President George Bush less than most--relish the zephyrs blowing from Moscow and are reluctant to disturb the cordial atmosphere by raising underlying issues of policy. But how prudent is it to base long-range policy on the premises of permanent Soviet goodwill?

East-West relations should not mimic popular movies in which the bad guy suddenly converts to a life of rectitude. Wise statesmanship will not rely on miracles. It will understand that a country of the size, importance and dynamism of the Soviet Union is unlikely to conceive its interests as always and inevitably paralleling our own.

Of course, a farsighted policy must also avoid a suspiciousness that could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is need for a better balance between relying on a changed mood and on structural safeguards. If that sense of proportion is abandoned, U.S. foreign policy may turn into an ever more frantic effort to fine-tune Soviet internal developments that are essentially beyond our control.

This is why Washington should re-examine the extraordinary public commitment to the person of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, again demonstrated at the summit in Moscow. Granted that Gorbachev deserves vast credit for launching the Soviet Union on the road to reform. The fact remains, however poignant, that nearly all Soviet democratic reformers are now opposed to him.

Gorbachev would not be the first revolutionary to be engulfed by the forces he has unleashed. Destiny and his own manipulative penchant have transformed him from a leader into a broker between the democratic reformers, who largely distrust him, and the remnants of the Establishment, who accept him only for want of a more authentic leader. Yet he needs both groups, because if either side gained a clear-cut victory, he would become dispensable. Gorbachev is now paying the price for his extraordinary dexterity in juggling and confusing contending forces. The internal tensions that were Gorbachev’s tool may soon become his necessity; in that case, his dramatic personality would turn into the problem rather than the solution.

Three outcomes are foreseeable for Gorbachev: He may be removed--though he is, in a sense, protected by the difficulty of agreeing on a replacement; he could lead an Establishment coup--though he would not long survive a conservative victory, or the Soviet president may be transformed into a symbolic head of state with some additional foreign-policy responsibilities.

The last outcome is the most likely and, of the three, the most desirable. But none of these evolutions can be significantly influenced from the outside.

To be sure, Gorbachev should be treated with the consideration due the head of government of a great nation. But in the end, that relationship must justify itself in terms of foreign-policy interest.

U.S. participation in the Soviet internal struggle risks getting bogged down in a morass that will drain our substance without advancing our purpose.

That purpose is usually stated in Wilsonian terms: democracy and market economics will ensure domestic Soviet tranquility and peaceful political conduct. These propositions reflect the best American tradition. But it is difficult to apply them to the chaotic Soviet context of three concurrent crises, each of which would, by itself, signal a major revolution: an economic free fall, a crisis in political legitimacy and a challenge to the structure of the state.

The transformation of a command economy to free-market conditions has not been successfully accomplished anywhere. Restructuring requires realistic pricing, which means inflation; closing inefficient enterprises, which means unemployment, and retraining the labor forces, which means massive dislocations.

Managing the inevitable severe austerity in the Soviet Union would be difficult for even a popular government. But the Soviet government enjoys only minimal public support. And its political crisis merges with a challenge to the structure of the empire, which has always been highly centralized.

Under glasnost , elected governments in the republics have more legitimacy and incomparably more public support than the central authorities. Six of the 15 republics have declared independence; the others claim various forms of autonomy. Until this is resolved, a coherent reform program cannot be implemented.

The difficulty of finding a way through this maelstrom is illustrated by Bush’s speech to the Ukrainian parliament following the summit. The President’s remarks paid tribute to the Ukrainian exploration of liberty but placed it within the context of a cohesive Soviet Union by praising the 9-plus-1 agreement between the center and nine of the Soviet republics, establishing a new federal relationship. The speech also sought to strike a balance between a far-off tyranny and local despotism.

But the attempt to balance the conflicting Soviet realities in a speech injects America into a civil conflict--and on the side of the central authorities--without advancing its solution. Democratization will almost certainly prove impossible to reconcile with unity; it will in all likelihood lead to the secession of several republics. On the other hand, unity is unobtainable without repression, which would undermine hopes for democracy, decentralization and even peace.

The United States cannot shape what it cannot predict. And it cannot foretell the nature of the Soviet economy at the end of the decade, its form of government or where the borders will be. The United States clearly has a historic obligation to encourage the democratic governments both in the center and in the republics. But if it involves itself too much in daily Soviet domestic conflicts, it may encourage actions it may later regret.

It cannot be in America’s or the world’s interest to be misunderstood by those in Moscow who favor repression or to create the illusion that such actions have no foreign-policy consequences. For any major repression--however justified--would mortgage U.S.-Soviet relations and endanger world peace. And once a cycle of violence begins, it will be only a short step before it is justified by historic Russian imperialist xenophobia.

The United States can work on an international system sufficiently flexible for genuine cooperation with the Soviet Union but resilient enough to resist assaults on it. For this purpose, periodic meetings of the heads of government of the nuclear superpowers are indispensable. But they cannot yield dramatic results even when they provide a useful forum for the explanation of the U.S. view of the relationship between domestic evolution and world peace.

Above all, the United States and the Soviet Union must recognize that their special position is ending. Any hegemonic implication is likely to spur the resistance of other power centers--a trend that would be more dangerous to the United States than to the Soviet Union, because the U.S. international position relies so much more on allies.