A foreign policy that seems to revolve around energy access? Unbelievable!

■"Putin, Acting in Character: A Pipeline Ploy Worthy of the Soviets," op-ed by Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, 5 January 2006, p. A15.

■"Russia and Ukraine Reach Compromise on Natural Gas," by Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, 5 January 2006, pulled from web.

Hoagland likes to ride Putin and he's right to do so. As I have said here many times, watching Putin rule is simply an exercise in observing the limits of the ex-commies in power: they know how to get power, they just don't know how to use it.

So yes, Putin now clings to his energy "influence" in the same way as Brezhnev and the gang (man, does that name evoke ancient history!) once did with nukes, because that's how Putin was raised and that's all he knows.

So the question isn't, "How do we change or reform Putin?" It's, "How do we help the next generation of Russian leaders see the world differently?"

The U.S. political system once viewed global energy supplies in very similar ways as Putin (and, increasingly, the Chinese and Indians) does today: either own the barrel in the ground or you've got bupkis in terms of power and influence. That view was pervasive in our national security establishment and political system as recently as the 1970s.

But we largely moved beyond that in the years that followed. By and large, we now see a fluid global oil market where our insecurity is defined less in terms of potential loss of supply than in potential movement of prices. But, just as clearly, New Core pillars India, China and Russia have yet to reach that maturity of understanding, so their foreign policies revolve around energy in as crude a fashion as ours once did.

What do we need to do? On some levels, time itself takes care of the problem, as governments and private sectors in all three countries will simply learn by experience.

Like so many things in life. It's not so much a matter of getting it right as not getting it wrong: avoid the unnecessary conflict and let your potential opponent grow past this point of immaturity.