Powerful environmental and animal rights groups in the United States suffered a serious setback last month when President Bill Clinton decided not to impose trade sanctions against Norway for resuming commercial whaling. Having spent more than $1 million promoting a trade ban, activists were so confident that sanctions would be imposed that they scheduled a news conference at Washington, D.C.'s National Press Club to declare their support, three days before the White House decision was delivered to the U.S. Congress.

But Mr. Clinton, by threatening sanctions at a later date, is playing a dangerous game of appeasement. Moreover, in straddling the issue he simply confused it. On the one hand, he restated the official U.S. stance against any commercial whaling; on the other hand, he professed - and this is new- "An equally strong commitment to science-based international solutions to global conservation problems."

The White House has succeeded in postponing the issue for now, but the question of sanctions will no doubt come up again. It is imperative that the Clinton administration acknowledge that such sanctions are not supported by science, violate the spirit of sustainable development, and, in addition, are contrary to the GATT agreement.

The trade sanctions threatened by Mr. Clinton have their legal grounding in the so-called Pelly Amendment to the Fishermen's Protective Act of 1967, which imposes automatic U.S. sanctions against countries that "diminish the effectiveness of the conservation program of the International Whaling Commission (IWC)." It requires the president to explain and justify any departure from such action.

Sanctions, however, had never been applied under previous administrations - though Norway, Canada, and Iceland had been "certified" several times to be in violation of the Pelly Amendment.

In his letter to the U.S. Congress, Mr. Clinton bemoaned "the absence of a credible, agreed management and monitoring regime that would ensure that commercial whaling is kept within a science-based limit," meaning that the criteria used for evaluating commercial whaling should be based on whether it endangered the species, rather than on whether such practices are humane or not. But the IWC, prodded by the U.S. delegation, rejected just such a management and monitoring regime at its May meeting.

As reported in the prestigious journal Science under the rubric "politics over science," the chairman of the IWC Science Committee, noted British fisheries biologist Philip Hammond, resigned in anger when the IWC refused to accept the committee's report on whale conservation. Five years in the making and unanimously adopted by the members of the Science Committee, the report would have permitted the limited harvesting of such non-endangered a species as the minke whale.

The Science Committee report has been widely praised, even by scientists like John Knauss, former U.S. commissioner to the IWC, who oppose commercial whaling on ethical grounds.

Now to put Norway's case into perspective; Norway permitted its fishermen to take 296 minkes of the 90,000 or so in its coastal waters; the world total is about one million minkes. Current Secretary of the IWC Ray Gambell, quoted in the May 4 London Times, conceded; "In all reason- ableness we would have to say that a commercial catch could be taken without endangering these [minkel whale stocks."

There is clearly no scientific basis for opposing Norway's action. But in the United States, organized opposition to commercial whaling plays to emotion, not logic. A direct-mail campaign by the World Wildlife Fund-USA earlier this year asked for "a special gift" to "save" the minke whale - implying this was an endangered whale species. The Animal Welfare Institute supported this claim by asserting, falsely, in full-page appeals in leading U.S. newspapers that the IWC Science Committee had "reaffirmed the protected status for minke whales. "

In the past, such pressure has produced results. In 1990, for example, the United States imposed an embargo on Mexican tuna, claiming that the lack of dolphin protection measures violated the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act. Mexico appealed this unilateral action, joined by the European Community, Australia, Canada, Japan, and other nations. A GATT panel ruled against the United States, prohibiting the United States from dictating the environmental standards of its trading partners. Notwithstanding the GATT decision, the U.S. Congress passed into law the International Dolphin Conservation Act of 1992, and Mexico caved in to avoid a U.S. embargo.

The Clinton administration's decision not to impose trade sanctions - at this time - may well have been an exception. After all, Norway is a long-time NATO ally, Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland is a highly regarded environmental stateswoman, and it was Norwegian Foreign Minister Johan Jorgen Hoist who was responsible for brokering mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, furthering U.S. Middle East policy goals.

But instead of heavy-handed threats of future sanctions, perhaps the administration should heed a basic purpose of the Marine Mammal Protection Act: "To determine the status of whales, porpoises and seals with respect to their optimum sustainable populations" - language that clearly permits harvesting according to scientific principles.