Ripples continue to flow from the presentation. The coterie of mostly faceless secret police wannabees who form Putin’s Russia’s Greek chorus have, often contradictorily, echoed his anti-American outburst. That it was promoted as an authoritative pronouncement on foreign policy majkes it all the more surreal. Those greybeards are no altogether wrong when they compare it with Nikita Khrushchev’s monkey tantrum during a speech by the ultra-dignified British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan at the United Nations.

True, like his Soviet mentors, Putin’s siloviki [workhorses of the old “security” apparatus] is using old methodology to murder journalists and even sending killers into the West to knock off dissidents and defectors. The media are virtually again all mouthpiece of an authoritarian regime. Decentralization achieved by force majeure with implosion of the Soviets has been replaced with Putin’s “verticalization”. Putin is renationalizing industry, particularly his only ace, huge oil and gas exports. The judicial system is intimidated. Political parties have become phantoms.

But when Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk in October 1960, he was speaking at the apex of Soviet power and propaganda. Sputnik’s launching by Moscow, introducing the space age, had shaken the world and spurred a young and vigorous Jack Kennedy to match its scientific achievements with the moon project. But it was being undermined at that very moment, of course, by its waste, corruption, and internal contradictions, to be faced down by Ronald Reagan’s decision to confront rather than live with the evil empire.

We don’t have to look far to see Putin, for all his bombast, represents a near-failed state. Russian population continues to decline precipitously, with male longevity lessening by the day — a Russia soon to be smaller than Vietnam. For all the talk of being the world’s largest gas exporter and one of the major oil marketers, Moscow has a GDP smaller than Mexico’s. Manufacturing is not growing. Even with heavy doses of foreign technology and investment, its heritage from overcapitalized Soviet defense industries cannot reproduce the old lumbering giant transports and depends on French [with American and Israeli add-ons] electronics to sell its latest fighter aircraft to China and India and Malaysia. [The Chinese reportedly have kicked back some engines as inferior.]

If Putin has a strategy beyond holding on to power — he is obsessed now with either amending the no-third-term constitution or installing one of his unreliable yes-men to continue the reign next year — it is hard to see. The meeting of foreign ministers of Russia, China and India in New Delhi a few days ago in pursuit of a “multipolarism” got nowhere. There must be some Russian generals besides the one or two who have spoken out semipublicly waking in the night to worry about the Chiness becoming the second largest minority in Russia, the continuing population depletion in Siberia, and the dwindling sales of its high tech weapons arming Beijing. There has been no long heralded reform of Russia’s own depleted and corrupt military — with a brand new scandal in Ras’ own St, Petersburg with prostitution and corruption of high officers. The cancer of the Second Chechnya War, which had much to do with reelecting Putin, continues and spreads to other Moslem areas despite Moscow’s propaganda to the contrary — with almost daily incidents of ambush and sabotage in one of Russia’s crucial oil transit points.

Ras may take comfort from the pall “Iraq” casts over the Bush Administration and from the Congressional talkathon preceding a bitter extenuated political campaign for 2008. But on the ground Washington’s strategy appears to have worked in sealing off a Russia to stew in its own juice while it attempts transition to a “normal” regime. What used to be mislabeled “eastern” Europe, central Europeans, has joined NATO along with the independent and increasingly prosperous Baltic states which escaped the Soviet empire. Middleeuropa is moving into the European Union. NATO has gone worldwide – reaching out to Afghanistan if tentatively and with unknown success.

Wielding his gas weapon like a caveman’s club, Ras has even antagonized his only two satellites, the Byelorussians and the Armenians. Washington ‘s bet — which even some of the industry believed was a loser — to build a new oil and gas corridor from the new huge Caspian reserves to world markets around Russia’s chokepoint is working. Even Kazakhstan, seeking to hedge its bets with Russian and Chinese outlets, has joined in. A new if hardly less tyrannical ruler in Turkmenistan may finally unlock the world’s second largest gas reserves to move in the same direction [if they cannot move across a pacified Afghanistan]. True, Bush’s hopes for democracy seem a long way off in the Stans but return of Moscow’s 250-year hegemony in Central Asia seems unlikely.

The American shoe is pinching elsewhere, too. By naming Russian companies under the U.S. unilateral sanctions against Iran [while pressing the feckless UN for a universal effort to halt Tehran’s aggressive regime], Moscow could lose third party customers for both military hardware and nuclear technology. Even the Moscow-lovers in New Delhi’s West Bloc are having to face a snowballing U.S.-India commercial relationship while Russian trade languishes.

The late unlamented, malevolent Marcus Wolf, longtime head of Communist East Germany’s Stassi secret police, when told Russian President Boris Yeltsin had plucked Putin out of obscurity to make him his successor [and protect “thefamily” from prosecution], said if, as reported, Putin had spent 15 years in Dresden for the KGB and hadn’t come to Wolf’s attention, he couldn’t have been much. It’s not just in the U.S. the Peter Principle sometimes throws up mediocrity. One can only hope Putin’s bombast won’t be followed with even more injudicious decision-making.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.