Russia Plotting Anti-U.S. Bloc

Embracing such nuclear powers as Communist China, Iran and India, it would serve two primary geopolitical ambitions shared by Putin's Soviet-era predecessors in Moscow:

• A counterweight to the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization

• A brake on the expansion of American interests in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region.

It would also serve one of China's overriding interests – rejection of the United States as a military and economic power in East Asia and the western arc of the Pacific Rim.

It comes when America's president-elect, George W. Bush, is assembling his top team, beginning with Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice, who takes a grim view of Russia, as his national security adviser.

According to a report Monday by the World Tribune, Putin's grand design is configured in several layers:

• It would begin by building on the already-existing economic and nuclear-weapons cooperation between Russia and Iran in Central Asia and Afghanistan.

• This alliance would then be expanded to include China and India.

• Added around the edges would be sub-alliances with former Soviet republics such as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

• With that complex coalition in place, the next step would be to try to peel Turkey away from its membership in NATO.

At the core of this Russian strategy is the intent to root out American investment in the exploration, production and transport of petroleum in and around the Caspian Sea – specifically the U.S.-proposed pipeline from Baku to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

There is already a lingering suspicion of NATO among states lying on the western reaches of Russia left over from the Cold War contest between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Washington created and backed NATO then as a defensive bulwark against Soviet expansion into Europe. That was interpreted by Moscow as a gun aimed at its head.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ostensible need for NATO as a rampart seemed to wane.

But with the bombing and occupation of Yugoslavia, NATO under the influence of the Clinton-Gore administration formally converted its charter from a defensive to an offensive alliance.

That has had the new Russian government nervous and resentful.

Increasingly, Putin's administration has been developing a closer economic and military relationship with China, India, Iran and Communist North Korea, all of it openly hostile to the United States.

Even as Putin was hard at work crafting this pan-Asian security bloc, he was in Cuba last week restoring the old Soviet-Cuban economic and strategic ties with President Fidel Castro – an undisguised move to regain a Russian foothold in what the United States has historically regarded as its hemispheric domain.

Those are some of the residual, unresolved foreign-policy challenges from the Clinton-Gore administration confronting the new Bush-Cheney administration, even before it takes office.