WASHINGTON - Vladimir Putin -- Russia's president, although the more accurate
title would be godfather -- made headlines recently with a speech in Munich
that set a new standard in anti-Americanism. He not only charged the United
States with the "hyper-use of force,"disdain for the basic principles of
international law" and having "overstepped its national borders in ... the
economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other
nations." He even blamed the spread of weapons of mass destruction, which the
United States has been combating with few allies and against constant Russian
resistance, on American "dominance" that "inevitably encourages" other
countries to defensively acquire them.

There is something amusing about criticism of the use of force by the man who
turned Chechnya into a smoldering ruin; about the invocation of international
law by the man who will not allow Scotland Yard to interrogate the
polonium-soaked thugs it suspects of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, yet
another Putin opponent to meet an untimely and unprosecuted death; about the
bullying of other countries decried by a man who cuts off energy supplies to
Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus in brazen acts of political and economic
extortion.

Less amusing is the greater meaning of Putin's Munich speech. It marks
Russia's coming out. Flush with oil and gas revenues, the consolidation of
dictatorial authority at home and the capitulation of both domestic and
Western companies to his seizure of their assets, Putin issued his boldest
declaration yet that post-Soviet Russia is preparing to reassert itself on the
world stage.

Perhaps the most important line in his speech was the least noted because it
seemed so innocuous. "I very often hear appeals by our partners, including our
European partners, to the effect that Russia should play an increasingly
active role in world affairs," he said. "It is hardly necessary to incite us
to do so."

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko once boasted that no conflict anywhere
on the globe could be settled without taking into account the attitude and
interests of the Soviet Union. Gromyko's description of Soviet influence
constitutes the best definition ever formulated of the term superpower.

And we know how Putin, who has called the demise of the Soviet Union the
greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century, yearns for those
superpower days. At Munich, he could not even disguise his Cold War nostalgia,
asserting that "global security" in those days was ensured by the "strategic
potential of two superpowers."

Putin's bitter complaint is that today there remains only one superpower, the
behemoth that dominates a "unipolar world." He knows that Moscow lacks the
economic, military and even demographic means to challenge America as in
Soviet days. He speaks more modestly of coalitions of aggrieved have-not
countries that Russia might lead in countering American power.

Hence his increasingly active foreign policy -- military partnerships with
China, nuclear cooperation with Iran, weapon supplies to Syria and Venezuela,
diplomatic support as well as arms for a genocidal Sudan, friendly outreach to
other potential partners of an anti-hegemonic (read: anti-American) alliance.

Is this a return to the Cold War? It is true that the ex-KGB agent
occasionally lets slip a classic Marxist anachronism such as "foreign capital"
(referring to Western oil companies) or the otherwise weird adjective "vulgar"
(describing the actions of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, which infuriated Putin by insisting upon a clean election in Ukraine).
He even intimated that he might undo one of the unequivocal achievements of
the late Cold War era, the so-called "zero option" agreement of 1987, and
restore a Soviet-style medium-range ballistic missile force.

Nonetheless, Putin's aggressiveness does not signal a return to the Cold War.
He is too clever to be burdened by the absurdity of Socialist economics or
Marxist politics. He is blissfully free of ideology, political philosophy and
economic theory. There is no existential dispute with the United States.

He is a more modest man: a mere Mafia don, seizing the economic resources and
political power of a country for himself and his mostly KGB cronies. And
promoting his vision of the Russian national interest -- assertive and
expansionist -- by engaging in diplomacy that challenges the dominant power in
order to boost his own.

He wants Gromyko's influence -- or at least some international acknowledgment
that Moscow must be reckoned with -- without the ideological baggage. He does
not want to bury us; he only wants to diminish us. It is 19th-century power
politics at its most crude and elemental. Putin does not want us as an enemy.
But at Munich he told the world that vis-à-vis America his Russia has gone
from partner to adversary.

Charles Krauthammer's column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers
Group.

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