MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be really excited about his new strategic partnership with Washington. For the sake of this still amorphous yet highly promising alliance, he has even decided to downplay his irritation about President George W. Bush's decision to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. Making a number of old-fashioned strategists in Moscow quite unhappy and another Eurasian giant, China, very angry, Putin expressed his firm belief in "the spirit of partnership and even alliance" with the United States or, more precisely, with its president.

It is easy to dismiss Putin's remarks as wishful thinking or even the bragging of a loser. This is hardly the case, however. Skillfully using the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks for his own ends, the Russian president is working on a most difficult diplomatic gambit: Russia's return to the great-power club as an equal.

The U.S. withdrawal from the ABM pact is hardly a challenge to Russia's security or its nuclear ego. For the next two decades or so, the missile shield envisioned by Bush will not be able to handicap Russia's military capacity. Therefore, fighting over the pact made sense only while Putin was trying to unite the world against the U.S. last spring. Now he is considering another option: allying with the U.S. against an unspecified number of countries. Let the losers get angry with Washington; Putin will watch conflicts with glee.