(NYTIMES) - When the United States, in its hour of hubris, went to war to remake the Middle East in 2003, Mr Vladimir Putin was a critic of US ambition, a defender of international institutions and multilateralism and national sovereignty. This posture was cynical and self-interested in the extreme. But it was also vindicated by events, as America's failures in Iraq and then Afghanistan demonstrated the challenges of conquest, the perils of occupation, the laws of unintended consequences in war.

And Mr Putin's Russia, which benefited immensely from US follies, proceeded with its own resurgence on a path of cunning gradualism, small-scale land grabs amid "frozen conflicts", the expansion of influence in careful, manageable bites.