Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post has a column today addressing Dmitry Medvedev’s foreign policy ambitions, and Russia’s attempt to create a “new world order” by fundamentally changing the postwar global security architecture.

For a variety of reasons, Putin is likely to come up as short in reshaping the world as Bush did — if the next U.S. administration is smart about handling the challenges Russia intends to mount to America’s lessening but still dominant role in European security and in international financial institutions. In Berlin, Medvedev provided few details of Russian intentions. But Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a June 20 speech and a follow-up conversation I had with him here, outlined an ambitious agenda of change in a new era of “multipolar cooperation . . . and collective leadership” in international affairs. A “new world order” cannot be based on “an Anglo-Saxon pattern that some have tried to establish for the rest of the world,” Lavrov said. It would involve doing away with “the Cold War architecture for the security of Europe.”