Power, Prestige, Clout, Patience

Steady as she goes. One doesn't attribute quiet patience to Vladimir Putin. He certainly is a man of many parts. Part autocrat, part hypocrite, part sinister, part cunning, part hero, and eminently successful at using all those attributes that would most certainly confuse a psychologist in its combination and persistent design at surmounting all obstacles, to now be poised on the cusp of bringing Russia back into contention as a super-power.

He has proven adept and far more successful at the kind of political skulduggery leavened with realpolitik and faux diplomacy that saw him outdistance in prominence and authority American President Barack Obama, Nobel Laureate and utter political-diplomatic failure. There exists now a fairly general consensus that the paper tiger roars with an American accent and the tiger that roams the jungles of world intrigue has the more convincing growl.

It's not even a resurgence of the cold war that so long kept Russia and the United States at distant loggerheads with one another; it is now, convincingly enough, Moscow dominating Washington, and, it seems, quite effortlessly. It is as though the heart and soul of democratic order has seeped out of a living wound to produce a creature that is limp and disinterested at the swirling events of the world outside its lair. Leaving ample opportunity for an avaricious opportunist to take up the slack.

Was the Obama administration fully cognizant of what it was embarking upon with its attention shifted from the Middle East to the Asia Pacific, ordering its fleet to abandon its long-held oceanic post in reflection of the administration's apparent disinterest in holding sway there, to its attention swivelling to the Chinese dragon stretching its lanced tail and talons among America's interests in the Pacific? One after another, former dependents and allies abandoned.

Egypt, so long in the American thrall of security and annual dues, finding itself in disfavour when it rejected the replacement for an ally that Obama had abandoned. Left to their own devices, licking wounds and looking for other sponsors it found Russia, willing and anxious to fill the gap. Saudi Arabia viewing the abandonment of colleague Hosni Mubarak fretted until they witnessed the disinterest in Syria and the uptick in interest in Iran.

Long a client for American arms, Saudi investment turned to Russian arms, literally and figuratively. If Iran was being permitted to continue developing its nuclear arms, Saudi Arabia was prepared to pay impoverished Pakistan, anguished over American impudence in its airspace, billions to deliver nuclear warheads. And the Kremlin could be assured that it would be welcome in Egypt to harbour its growing naval fleet in exchange for arms sales.

How the political landscape has emerged into an entirely new configuration! Russia, so long an anxious outsider is suddenly in. In with the two arch enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran, in with Egypt and with its distasteful neighbour Syria as well. And Israel, let's not forget the lone non-Muslim state, perpetually at anguished political war and secret economic ties with its neighbours, polarized between loathing it and emulating its enterprise.

Look out, Europe! With its fingers dabbling in Middle East oil to augment its own vast resources, and its investment interests in Israel's burgeoning gas fields, Russia is in a powerful position to continue and increase its energy-provision-bullying it seems to take such delight in, provoking Europe to conniptions of energy-needs-withholding aggravation.

The United States, thanks to the peptic ulcer of indifference that has assailed its current administration, its inability to make a decision and stick with it, its propensity to abandon its long-time friends and allies, its growing capacity to clownishly keep hitting its foot with its orchestral conductor's baton, stands the risk of perishing from septicemia like the unfortunate Jean Baptist Lully. Its orchestration of power and authority has failed it in the Middle East, its former stage.

No one trusts America any longer; its word is no longer sacrosanct, it has defected from its former place of trust. Well, perhaps motivated in part by the fact that it has discovered its own limitless (almost) petroleum and gas deposits to be exploited for its energy needs, no longer dependent on those of the Middle East. And it has a neighbour, right next door inhabiting a full half of the continent with immeasurable deposits of both.

Another source of ongoing energy extraction. Except, oh dear, it has chosen to alienate that old ally as well.