President Vladimir Putin of Russia has been making headlines in European newspapers over his changing attitude to NATO and the European Union in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States. Last week he told the Bundestag in Berlin that Russia would consider beginning talks about joining NATO, given the changing nature of that alliance. In Brussels yesterday he visited its headquarters and told a press conference his country would be willing to reconsider its opposition to NATO enlargement if it were involved in that process and satisfied the alliance is genuinely becoming more a political than a military organisation.
These are breathtaking developments of policy, which could hardly have been imagined prior to last month's atrocities. They provide further illustration of how rapidly the world is being transformed in response. Russia, like every other State, is having to calculate how to pursue its interests in such a rapidly changing environment.
Mr Putin obviously sees an opportunity to persuade the United States and European states to reconsider their opposition to his government's repressive policies in Chechnya, where it blames terrorism on the same organisations responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington.
He has also good reason to make common cause with the Europeans in using the crisis to head off the Bush administration's commitment to an anti-missile de fence system and to encourage the multilateralists within it to reconsider that policy. By responding so positively to the crisis at the United Nations Security Council and by encouraging Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to offer the US military facilities he hopes to gain leverage with Washington.
It would be wrong to see these Russian positions as mere cynical opportunism; if responded to sympathetically and imaginatively they can become part of a constructively reorganised world more capable of tackling terrorism and conditions that give rise to it.