IN THE beginning of 2003, the Bush Administration was genuinely surprised by Moscow's handling of the Iraq issue. President Vladimir Putin's decision to oppose the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq alongside France and Germany was arguably his most important foreign policy move since September 2001, when he boldly led his reluctant countrymen into something that promised to become a strategic partnership with the United States. Thirty months later, he seemed to have backtracked from what was seen as an underconstructed parmership. When, in spring 2003, France, Germany and Russia formed a "coalition of the unwilling", many observers believed that Putin was returning to his pre-9/11 emphasis on relations with Europe. By this fall, however, the troika was largely history, and relations with George W. Bush were more or less patched up. Such pirouettes are by no means reserved for relations with the United States. The Chinese, for their part, still quietly reeling after Putin's 2001 volte-face on the ABM Treaty, were greatly surprised by Russia's abrupt change in its stance on the Angarsk Daqin pipeline, only a few months after Presidents Putin and Hu Jintao had formally endorsed it. The natural question to ask, then, is whether Putin's vaunted pragmatism is Russia's sole guiding foreign policy light, or does Russia actually have a foreign policy doctrine?
