WORLD : Soviet Euphoria Cooling: Cheney

ROME — U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney today defended his cautious, hard-line approach to Soviet reform and said Western euphoria over Mikhail S. Gorbachev appeared to be cooling.

Cheney, winding up a tour of West European capitals before heading for Australia, said more Western officials now realize the immensity of the task taken on by the Soviet leader.

“I don’t sense there’s quite as much euphoria as there was earlier,” he told reporters traveling with him. “The thing that I had expressed to me on a number of occasions by some of the people I talked to was . . . that they saw the magnitude of the problems he was trying to deal with,” Cheney said.

Cheney stressed that he was not predicting that Gorbachev’s efforts at political and economic reform would fail and said he wished the Soviet leader well.