The Russian bear in America's backyard: Bernd Debusmann

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As insults to national pride go, it was a classic -- the American response to Russian plans to send a nuclear battle cruiser and other ships to the Caribbean for exercises with the navy of U.S. enemy Hugo Chavez.

"We'll see if they actually make it there," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told a news conference questioner.

"Somebody told me they had a tugboat accompanying them in case they break down along the way ... It was very interesting that they found some ships that could actually make it that far down to Venezuela."

Public diplomacy at its finest? It was in line with the Bush administration's generally dismissive attitude towards Russia and conjured up images of ageing rust buckets, not the flagship of Russia's Northern Fleet, the Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great), which entered service 10 years ago.

It would be the first time since the Cold War that Russian vessels enter the Caribbean, traditionally part of the U.S backyard. They are scheduled to arrive in November, a week after Americans elect a new president.

Their presence might help the president-elect focus on how to deal with Russia more effectively than President George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his tutor on Russian affairs, first as national security adviser and later as secretary of state.

Rice has a doctorate in Soviet studies and speaks fluent Russian but judging from the way U.S.-Russian relations have deteriorated over the past 7-1/2 years, that gave her no more insight into the Kremlin than Bush. He famously said, after his first meeting with Vladimir Putin in 2001, that he had looked him in the eye and "was able to get a sense of his soul."

His soul, perhaps, but not a ruthless mind set on restoring Russia, a country with a 1,000-year history, to the status of a Great Power, an ambition Washington did not take particularly seriously. "The United States has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the government paralyzed," according to George Friedman, head of the private intelligence service Stratfor.

Or, as President Dmitry Medvedev put it to a meeting of political scientists this month: "In the 1990s ... we were weak and sickly."

Russia recovered, its economy boosted by oil, its military slowly rebuilt. The new Russia made its debut on the world stage on August 8, with a massive counter-attack in response to an attempt by Georgia, Washington's closest ally in the Caucasus, to seize control of the pro-Russian breakaway province of South Ossetia.

The Russian thrust extended well into Georgia and in the Washington version of events, this was an unprovoked attack by big bad Russia on poor little Georgia.

A RUSSIAN MONROE DOCTRINE

Since then, Medvedev has spelt out what amounts to a Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine, the 19th century U.S. assertion that European powers must not interfere in the Americas. Russia, Medvedev said, "has regions where it has privileged interests." In other words: you stay out of our region, we stay out of yours. If you stage naval maneuvers in the Baltic, we can do so in the Caribbean.

The United States has moved steadily into Russia's sphere of influence since the Soviet Union collapsed, breaking a promise by two American presidents, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, not to expand NATO into the territory of the former Soviet Union.