Enough Rope for Russia

MOSCOW -- Vladimir Putin's switch from running Russia as its president to running Russia as its prime minister has changed traffic patterns here but little else.

Traffic jams knot into epic proportions as streets around the Kremlin are regularly shut down for the motorcades of Putin and his handpicked successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev. "It is natural," a Russian motorist said the other day. "We have two presidents now."

Since his May inaugural, Medvedev has put a softer face on Putin's fierce determination to show the world that Russia is back as a major power. Traveling to Berlin early this month on one of his first trips as president, Medvedev stressed the need for "a new world order."

Leaders call for the founding of a new world order only when they are convinced that their nation will dominate it. That was true for George H.W. Bush in 1991, and it is true today for Putin, Medvedev and others in Russia's reformulated leadership.

The term Bush popularized in the wake of his heady military triumph in Kuwait is increasingly used by Kremlin officials to demonstrate that the U.S. moment in world power has passed and that Russia's moment is fast arriving.

For a variety of reasons, Putin is likely to come up as short in reshaping the world as Bush did -- if the next U.S. administration is smart about handling the challenges Russia intends to mount to America's lessening but still dominant role in European security and in international financial institutions.

In Berlin, Medvedev provided few details of Russian intentions. But Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a June 20 speech and a follow-up conversation I had with him here, outlined an ambitious agenda of change in a new era of "multipolar cooperation . . . and collective leadership" in international affairs.

A "new world order" cannot be based on "an Anglo-Saxon pattern that some have tried to establish for the rest of the world," Lavrov said. It would involve doing away with "the Cold War architecture for the security of Europe."

He proposed a European Security Conference to bring together the United States, Russia, the European Union and other regional organizations, such as NATO, to establish new controls on armies and alliances in the "Euro-Atlantic space."

The idea as presented will not appeal to either the Bush administration or its successor. The unacknowledged intent is to reduce the importance of the United States and NATO in European security.

But it does reflect a realization by Russian leaders that they are now seen by the rest of the world as a "veto power" constantly saying no -- to NATO expansion, Kosovo independence or greater international involvement in Darfur. They have concluded that under Medvedev, they need instead to start putting forward more positive-sounding proposals.

Medvedev's role so far involves presentation more than substance. He has not been able to name his own foreign policy adviser, while Putin is installing Yuri Ushakov, the outgoing and effective ambassador to Washington, as his deputy chief of staff and de facto diplomatic adviser.