Sleeping With the Enemy.(Russian foreign policy)

It wasn't exactly your ordinary business trip. The first thing the Russian executive saw as he walked off the plane in Baghdad last month was a slogan emblazoned on the floor of the jetway: DOWN WITH THE U.S.! Later, when Yevgeny and his colleagues reached their work site, they heard the distant thump of bombs from a U.S. airstrike. That was in An Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, where Yevgeny's company has been building an 800-megawatt power station. Working in Iraq has its quirks, Yevgeny says, refusing to give his last name, but he insists that's no reason to ignore a potentially lucrative market. "We participate in tenders in Iraq all the time. It's all in strict conformity with United Nations rules."

Business as usual? Lately, Russia isn't just continuing its tradition of schmoozing with rogue states around the world. It's actually stepping up relations with several of them. As if in conscious response to George W. Bush's diatribes against an "Axis of Evil," Russia has forged its own axis of friendship, recently announcing a series of deals that extend and deepen its cooperation with Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Late last week, Vladimir Putin traveled to the Far East city of Vladivostok for talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, who recently arrived on his private train to examine opportunities for business cooperation with Moscow. A new trade agreement with Baghdad, set for signing in the coming weeks, is said to be worth from $40 billion to $60 billion and encompasses 70 different projects from food production to oilfield equipment. And just in case Washington didn't get the message, Moscow has also declared its intention to expand a project to help the Iranians build a nuclear reactor--an undertaking that has been bedeviling Russia-U.S. relations for years.

One could argue that there's nothing new about Moscow's cultivating ties with international pariahs. Ties with Iraq and North Korea date back to Soviet days, and the reactor-building project in the Iranian city of Bushehr started under Boris Yeltsin in 1995. But that was before 9-11 and the astounding turnaround in Russian-American relations that followed. Earlier this year Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush met in Moscow to seal a new alliance against the common enemy of terrorism. Officials from the White House and Pentagon fell over each other to express thanks for Russia's contribution to the war in Afghanistan. Commentators have been taking it as given that the United States can count on Russian oil to buoy the Western economy if Washington launches an attack on Iraq.

To anyone paying close attention, though, it was clear from the start that Russia's coziness with the terrible trio would complicate things. Even during the sweetness-and-light Moscow summit, senior U.S. officials could be heard behind the scenes, warning about Russian courting of Iran in particular. Those fears proved justified earlier this month, when Moscow announced not only that it was planning to finish the $800 million nuclear reactor in Bushehr, but was also giving the go-ahead to an additional 10-year program for five more reactors--a contract worth up to $10 billion. That left American officials speechless--among them, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who just happened to be visiting Moscow and pointedly avoided any public comment about the problem during his visit.

Russia's latest initiatives with Iraq, though, seem to be provoking a more strenuous response. A congressional delegation led by Rep. Henry Hyde came to Moscow last week asking for clarification of Russia's policy toward rogue states and admonishing the Kremlin that the new Russian-American alliance could suffer as a result. But that was nothing compared with the broadside delivered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld late in the week. Friendliness toward rogues, ...