PERSPECTIVE ON THE HELSINKI SUMMIT : Eye-to-Eye, but Not Arm-in-Arm : The ideological bases for earlier Soviet positions have been abandoned; the policies themselves will be harder to retire.

Their cordial personal relationship notwithstanding, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev are not about to forge a common Middle East policy. Their meeting Sunday marked a major departure in Soviet-American relations, but it provided no ready answer for solving the crisis in the Persian Gulf.

The United States and the Soviet Union share the aim of defusing the regional conflict, but their national interests in the Middle East are as divergent now as they were before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. While it is reasonable to expect that the two superpowers have in common concerns for world peace and the need to defeat aggressor states, it is not reasonable to expect that they will have common national security interests.

For more than 30 years, the differences between U.S. and Soviet foreign-policy goals in the region were justified largely in ideological terms. We backed Israel, and, especially after 1967, the Soviet Union redoubled its support of the Arab world. Many of Israel’s enemies were “progressive” Arab socialist regimes, with some ideological goals in common with the Soviet Union. This made it even easier for the Soviets to side not just with the Arabs, but more particularly with the Palestinian cause.

Now the ideological justification of earlier Soviet policies has been formally abandoned, but the policies themselves will be harder to retire.

The United States has defined the Persian Gulf as vital to our strategic concerns, but the Soviets have a physical presence in the region and cannot pull back easily as the United States can. An energy-secure America might in the long run be forced to abandon the gulf oil fields, but Moscow must remain sensitive to the long Muslim border on its southern flank.

The Soviet Union is itself a South Asian nation with a Muslim population of 50 million, larger than that of the entire Arabian peninsula. More over, the Muslim population, which is approaching 20% of that of the Soviet Union as a whole, has been using the issue of republic sovereignty to become organized as a potentially powerful lobby.

Unlike America’s pro-Israel lobby, this critical Soviet constituency does not as yet have well-articulated foreign-policy goals. But this simply compounds Gorbachev’s problems, for he must try to anticipate the Soviet Muslims’ future policy preferences, so as not to inadvertently cross them.

The potential linkage between the Persian Gulf crisis and the rise of Islamic nationalism is troubling to both the United States and the Soviet Union. An escalation in the crisis could spark a wave of religious-inspired political activism that could lead to the overthrow of America’s allies in the region. This same activism could further undermine a precarious internal situation in the Soviet Union, and threaten the millions of Russian living in the Muslim regions.

The Muslim population is still smarting from the Soviet Union’s nearly decade-long military engagement in Afghanistan. No Russian leader could easily mobilize them to defend the nation’s interests against a Muslim power. It would be difficult even to muster a predominantly Russian fighting force for service in the Persian Gulf.

However, Gorbachev was able to accept Bush’s contention that U.S. security interests and international concerns more generally could be served by a U.S.-dominated regional military presence. And Bush accepted that there would not be direct Soviet involvement in non-U.N. organized police forces in the region.

Part of the differences between the United States and Soviet positions on how best to use the threat of force to contain Saddam Hussein comes from the vulnerability of Gorbachev’s power base. In today’s Soviet Union, concern for restoring economic order must take precedence over major initiatives in foreign policy. However, Gorbachev recognizes that, by dedicating himself to the reduction of international tensions, he will receive international support for his country’s economic recovery.

But real differences remain in the foreign-policy goals of the two nations. The United States remains committed to the existence of Israel at all costs, while the Soviet Union is more concerned with ensuring justice for the Palestinians. The United States wants to preserve the monarchies of the region, while the Soviet Union has taken pains not to harm relations with Syria or even to break its military contracts with Iraq.

Still, Soviet-American relations are now past the point of polemics. The Helsinki summit lacked drama but not significance. George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev now can accept differences in each other’s positions yet still work together. Ongoing dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union will help mediate conflict in the Middle East, but it cannot make the substantive differences between the two nations disappear.