DON'T LET DOWN GUARD FOR NEW COMMONWEALTH

The cascade of global events in recent years so numbed Western minds that the actual dismantling of the Soviet Union proved a mere matter of course. Such an anti-climax is unbefitting a momentous event. Flash back to President Reagan's second inaugural, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, even to a year ago, and you couldn't envision the dissolution of a superpower the world witnessed last week. What had been to America an "evil empire" a decade ago is now defunct. It is a time for celebration. It is also a time for caution.

America is a nation where laws are often made at a snail's pace, where changes in the governmental order are usually painstaking. The speed and inertia of reform, particularly in a nation where freedom has long been repressed, leave us awestruck. Much of America's global demeanor since World War II has been shaped by the counterweight of Soviet influence. Many of the resources of the United States have been devoted to negating actions of the Kremlin and the satellite governments it funded and directed.

There is, indeed, a new world order, one that the United States has helped facilitate and one that the United States should help shape. For all the changes Mikhail Gorbachev brought to the Soviet Union, he embodied the old order. His vision was little more than a "new and improved" communism. Gorbachev's time had come and gone, and Boris Yeltsin carries the mantle for an emerging commonwealth of democratic leanings. The evil empire, guided by stiff bureaucrats and ideologues, has become dust.

Our enchantment with this development must be tem~pered, however, by the re~al~ization that things have happened so quickly. The massive commonwealth is struggling to restructure itself at the same time it is struggling to feed and shelter its people. Powerful figures inside and outside Moscow will not recoil from taking advantage of these volatile times. It is crucial that the United States keep a close eye on the dynamics of the new government.

While the commonwealth remains in a fluid condition, remnants of its military might, built through decades of attention and expenditure, are still very much evident. Within the republics making up the new commonwealth, there are no fewer than 27,000 nuclear weapons. While Cold War pressures have eased in a sense we were accustomed to, Americans won't necessarily sleep better knowing that many warheads are in the hands of a foreign power, no matter how democratically minded its new leaders.

The Soviet Union is no more. Such a wish made a decade ago would have been dismissed as fantasy. As the new commonwealth takes shape, however, Americans must be mindful of the need not to let down their guard.