NEWS ANALYSIS : In Just 7 Months, U.S. Foreign Ties Took Sharp Turns : Policy: The honeymoon with Moscow ended. And expectations for special relations with Tokyo and Bonn have dimmed.

WASHINGTON — On Aug. 2, the day Iraqi troops stormed Kuwait, Eduard A. Shevardnadze was the Soviet foreign minister and a strong supporter of American foreign policy. Now, at war’s end, Shevardnadze works in a powerless Moscow think tank.

When the crisis began, Margaret Thatcher was in her 11th year as British prime minister and was widely seen as playing the role of key adviser and supporter of President Bush. Now, Thatcher is retired, and Bush has become a driving force among Western leaders.

At the time of the Iraqi invasion, Bush Administration officials were speaking of a new U.S. “global partnership” with Japan. They were boycotting meetings with top Chinese leaders and dismissing Syria as an international outcast. Now, these ideas and approaches have been at least temporarily cast aside.

During the seven months of the Persian Gulf crisis and the U.S.-led war with Iraq, the world has changed, and so have U.S. relations with foreign leaders and governments.

“This has brought us a decade or more of credibility in the world,” one senior State Department official gloated this week. “The ghost of Vietnam has faded. The lesson for other countries is that the United States did respond, formed a coalition and was willing to take risks.”

To Administration foreign policy planners, the world now looks like a considerably different place than it did last August. The past seven months have served as a critical test, demonstrating how various countries, world leaders and international institutions will react during a crisis.

These wartime changes are not unprecedented. Virtually every international conflict has produced different foreign policy alignments from those that prevailed when the shooting started.

At the outbreak of both World War I and World War II, the United States was a distant and self-absorbed nation, sitting on the sidelines and seeking to avoid entanglement in faraway conflicts. Yet by the end of both wars, it had emerged as a crucial player in the allied victories.

So, too, Russia was a key member of the alliance against Germany at the start of World War I, but, hobbled by domestic revolutions, it made its own early and separate peace.

During the initial stages of World War II, Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek was treated as one of the closest and most important of U.S. allies. By the end of the conflict, Chiang had become a marginal and often scorned figure.

“We had entered this war, invited the (Japanese) attack on Pearl Harbor, to save Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘Free China,’ ” Theodore H. White said in his book, “In Search of History.” However, White continued, at the end of the war, “all things were fluid, the world map to be redrawn, Asia to be reshaped.”

Of the many foreign policy changes that have occurred during the Persian Gulf conflict, several are paramount:

The Gulf crisis has strained the close working ties that existed last summer between the Bush Administration and the Kremlin. It seems much less likely now that the United States and the Soviet Union--for decades the world’s two reigning superpowers--will try to team up to determine, largely by themselves, the course of world events.

The day after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Administration concentrated its diplomatic efforts on obtaining a joint U.S.-Soviet statement calling for an Iraqi pullout. Secretary of State James A. Baker III flew hurriedly to Moscow and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with then-Foreign Minister Shevardnadze to deliver the statement.

It is doubtful that such strong efforts at joint U.S.-Soviet cooperation will occur again any time soon. In the days before it launched the ground war, the United States spurned a series of Soviet peace initiatives in a manner that would have been unthinkable last August.

In fact, when Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz journeyed to Moscow seeking to enlist Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s help in obtaining peace, a Pentagon spokesman branded what was happening in Moscow “a sideshow.”

The war has shattered American expectations that, in the early 1990s, Japan and Germany would serve as allies and close partners in American foreign policy. Those hopes were raised when Bush spoke last year of a new “global partnership” between the United States and Japan.

At the time of the Iraqi invasion, Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu was riding a crest of domestic popularity. But Kaifu’s repeated efforts to line up Japanese support--both money and personnel--for the U.S.-led effort in the Gulf ran into such strong opposition that his own political future is now in doubt.

“It is crucial that Japan be able to cooperate effectively . . . in personnel terms and in material terms,” Kaifu told the Japanese Parliament last fall. But in the end, Japan avoided sending any personnel to the Gulf, and a $9-billion financial pledge toward the costs of allied operations was still awaiting legislative approval when hostilities ceased this week.

“The Americans are most resentful that their actions in the Middle East will directly serve the interests of Japanese commerce,” observed UC San Diego Prof. Chalmers Johnson. “And the Japanese dislike being asked to pay for a war where they were never consulted on objectives, strategy or anything else.”

Similar tensions have eroded American ties with Germany, which, like Japan, was hesitant to support the American campaign against Iraq because of its own post-World War II tradition of pacifism.

“Before the Gulf crisis began, there was a lot of talk about an American ‘special relationship’ with Germany. That’s temporarily dead,” said Harvard University Prof. Stanley Hoffmann. “I think the Germans feel misunderstood and unloved, which is a recurrent theme in German history.”

Despite the Administration’s reliance on the U.N. Security Council last summer and fall to advance the anti-Iraq effort, the past seven months have demonstrated the limits of depending so heavily upon that multilateral institution.

“Never in its existence has the potential of the United Nations as a force for peace and stability been clearer. That’s due in no small part to unprecedented cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union,” said Baker in a Los Angeles speech last October.

Yet by the end of the war, the United States was trying to play down and avoid meetings of the U.N. Security Council, where the Soviet Union and China have veto power enabling them to block or restrain American initiatives.

Instead of the United Nations, the war has prompted the Administration to rely heavily upon ever-closer links with a handful of countries in Western Europe and the Middle East: Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

To some extent, the military coalition that fought this week on the sands of Kuwait and Iraq is a throwback.

The United States, Britain and France, after all, are the same powers that fought together in World War I and World War II. In that respect, Bush’s “new world order” doesn’t look all that different from the old order.