U.S. President Barack Obama’s Moscow visit offers a historic opportunity to avert a new Cold War by establishing a more stable and cooperative relationship between the West and Russia.

Obama has reiterated his "commitment to a more substantive relationship with Russia." This needs to translate into policy moves symbolizing new, broad engagement.

Three important facts about Russia stand out. One, Russia has gradually become a more assertive power after stemming its precipitous decline and drift of the 1990s. Two, it now plays the Great Game on energy. Competition over control of hydrocarbon resources was a defining feature of the Cold War and remains an important driver of contemporary geopolitics, as manifest from the American occupation of Iraq and U.S. military bases or strategic tie-ups stretching across the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia.

Three, Russian democracy has moved toward greater centralized control to bring order and direction to the state. During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, government control was extended to large swaths of the economy and the political opposition was systematically emasculated.

Such centralization, though, is no different than in, say, Singapore and Malaysia, including the domination of one political party, the absence of diversified media, limits on public demonstrations and the writ of security services. But in contrast to Russia, Singapore and Malaysia have insulated themselves from U.S. criticism by willingly serving Western interests. When did you last hear official American criticism of Singapore’s egregious political practices?

Yet Russia faces a rising tide of Western censure for gradually sliding toward autocratic control at home. Actually, ideological baggage, not dispassionate strategic deliberation, tends to often color U.S. and European discourse on Russia.

Another reason is Russia’s geographical presence in Europe, the "mother" of both the Russian and U.S. civilizations. There is thus a greater propensity to hold Russia to European standards, unlike, say, China. Also, Russia was considered a more plausible candidate for democratic reform than China, now the world’s largest, oldest and strongest autocracy. Little surprise Russia’s greater centralization evokes fervent Western reaction.

Today’s Russia, however, bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union. Life for the average Russian is freer and there is no Soviet-style shortage of consumer goods. There are also no online censors regulating Internet content as in China, and criticism of the Russian government is, by and large, tolerated, especially if it does not threaten the position of those in power.

While China seeks to project power in distant lands, including Africa and Latin America, Russia wishes to project power in its own neighborhood, or what it calls its "Far Abroad," including Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Central Asia and the Caucuses. Given its geopolitical focus on states in its vicinity, not on the "Far Abroad," Russia, with its size and clout, is able to bring pressure and intimidation to bear on such adjacent states. And given its own relative stability, Russia is able to exploit political instability in neighboring states.

But what now looks like a resurgent power faces major demographic and economic challenges to build and sustain great-power capacity over the long run.

Demographically, Russia is even in danger of losing its Slavic identity and becoming a Muslim-majority state in the decades ahead, unless government incentives succeed in encouraging Russian women to have more children. The average age of death of a Russian male has fallen to 58.9 years — nearly two decades below an American. While Japan faces a population decline, Russia confronts depopulation.

Economically, the oil-price crash has come as a warning to Russia against being a largely petro-state.

In fact, Moscow’s economic fortunes for long have been tied too heavily to oil — a commodity with volatile prices. In 1980, the Soviet Union overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer. But oil prices began to decline, plummeting to $9 a barrel in mid-1986. U.S. intelligence, failing to read the significance of this, continued to claim Moscow was engaged in massive military modernization. During the Putin presidency, rising oil prices played a key role in Russian economic revival.

The higher the oil prices, the less the pressure there is on Russia to restructure and diversify its economy. The present low prices thus offer an opportunity to Moscow to reform.

Still, it should not be forgotten that Russia is the world’s wealthiest country in natural resources — from fertile farmlands and metals, to gold and timber. It sits on colossal hydrocarbon reserves. It also remains a nuclear and missile superpower. Indeed, to compensate for the erosion in its conventional-military capabilities, it has increasingly relied on its large nuclear arsenal, which it is ambitiously modernizing.

Whatever its future, the big question is: What is the right international approach toward a resurgent Russia? Here two aspects need to be borne in mind.

First, Russia geopolitically is the most important "swing" state in the world today. Its geopolitical swing worth is more than China’s or India’s. While China is inextricably tied to the U.S. economy and India’s geopolitical direction is clearly set toward closer economic and political engagement with the West — even as New Delhi retains its strategic autonomy — Russia is a wild card. A wrong policy course on Russia by the West would not only prove counterproductive to Western interests, but also affect international peace and security. It could push Moscow inexorably in the wrong direction, creating a new East-West divide.

Second, there are some useful lessons applicable to Russia that the West can draw on how it has dealt with another rising power. China has come a long way since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of prodemocracy demonstrators. What it has achieved in the last generation in terms of economic modernization and the opening of minds is extraordinary. That owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after Tiananmen Square but instead to integrate China into global institutions.

That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful impact of the opposite decision taken on Burma after 1988 — to pursue a punitive approach relying on sanctions. Had the Burma-type approach been applied against China, the result would not only have been a less-prosperous and less-open China, but also a more-paranoid and possibly destabilizing China. The obvious lesson is that engagement and integration are better than sanctions and isolation.

Today, with a new chill setting in on relations between the West and Russia, that lesson is in danger of getting lost. Russia’s 16-year effort to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) has still to bear fruit, even as Moscow is said to be in the last phase of negotiations, and the U.S.- Russian nuclear deal remains on hold in Washington.

Little thought has been given to how the West lost Russia, which during its period of decline eagerly sought to cozy up to the U.S. and Europe, only to get the cold shoulder from Washington. And even as NATO is being expanded right up to Russia’s front yard and after the U.S.-led the action in engineering Kosovo’s February 2008 self-proclamation of independence, attention has focused since last August on Moscow’s misguided five-day military intervention in Georgia and its recognition of the self-declaration of independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia — actions that some have tried to portray as the 21st century’s first forcible changing of borders.

But having sponsored Kosovo’s self- proclamation of independence, the U.S. and some of its allies awkwardly opposed the same right of self-determination for the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Can the legitimacy of a self-declaration of independence depend on which great power sponsors that action?

The world cannot afford a new Cold War, which is what constant baiting of the Russian bear will bring. Fortunately, there are some positive signs. Seeking to heel the rift triggered by the yearlong developments over Georgia, the U.S. and Russia are resuming full military cooperation and have reopened negotiations on nuclear arms control, with the talks centered on quickly establishing a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, whose 15-year term runs out December 5. Also, the U.S. is going slow on missile-defense deployments in Eastern Europe and there is a de facto postponement of NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia.

Russia, for its part, has continued to provide critical logistic assistance to the U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan. As part of what Obama has called a "reset" of the bilateral relationship, a U.S.-Russia joint commission headed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is being established, along with several sub-commissions. This is an improvement on the 1993 commission established at the level of No. 2s, Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

To be sure, fundamental differences between Washington and Moscow persist on some major international and regional issues — from U.S. opposition to the Russian idea for an international treaty to outlaw cyberspace attacks along the lines of the Chemical Weapons Convention to the continuing discord over Georgia spurring rival military maneuvers in the Caucasus region.

The increasingly authoritarian Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, blamed by some international analysts for provoking last year’s war through a military strike on South Ossetia that killed Russian peacekeepers and civilians, has become for Moscow what Cuba’s then leader Fidel Castro was for Washington — the villain-in-chief.

The key issue is whether the U.S. and Russia will rise above their differences and seize the new opportunity to redefine their relationship before it becomes too late. For Russia, the challenge is to engage a skeptical West more deeply. It also needs to increase its economic footprint in Asia, where its presence is largely military. For the U.S., the challenge is to pursue new geopolitics of engagement with Moscow.

North Korea and Pakistan present unique nuclear-proliferation risks because they challenge the very premise on which the international anti-proliferation measures have been built.

While North Korea is often compared with Iran, the challenge it poses is more akin to Pakistan’s. Both Pakistan and North Korea are actual proliferation threats as opposed to Iran’s potential proliferation challenge. But while North Korea is a growing regional threat, Pakistan — with its expanding nuclear armory, terrorists and jihadist-infiltrated military and nuclear establishments — presents itself as an international nightmare.

In the past, these two countries have clandestinely bartered Pakistani uranium-enrichment knowhow for North Korean missile technology. Today, they are showing that the nuclear abolition debate is not germane to the key proliferation challenges in Asia, even if movement on the stalled disarmament process helps reduce incentives to proliferation in some other cases.

The present global anti-proliferation measures are tied to three key elements: The continued stability and credibility of the nonproliferation regime; the exercise of punitive power, when necessary, to enforce observance of global norms and rules; and the raising of costs for proliferators.

The outlook of North Korea and Pakistan, however, is founded on a fundamentally antithetical premise, which can be summed up as: Threaten to fail, then reap rewards.

For these two dissimilar nations, potential state failure actually serves as an incentive to extort ransom money internationally. Both have assiduously sought to leverage their weakness into strength diplomatically, with Pakistan more successful than North Korea. "We’ll fail if you don’t come to our support" is their refrain. That is another way of saying: "Pay up or face the consequences."

In that light, it is proving very difficult to hold them to any international standards.

In fact, Pakistan’s success in extracting ever-more international aid has only emboldened North Korea to follow suit. Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test — its second in less than three years — is a desperate move to garner international aid.

If Islamabad can play nuclear poker to shield its export of terrorism and still get rewarded with $23.6 billion in international aid commitments just in the last six months ($5.5 billion of which came at the April donors conference in Tokyo), Pyongyang reckoned it could stage its own nuclear-and-missile show to draw the world’s attention.

While vowing to "take action" against North Korea over its test, U.S. President Barack Obama has set out to make Pakistan the single largest recipient of U.S. assistance in the world, leaving Israel and Egypt behind in the aid sweepstakes.

When Pakistan rakes in a windfall, North Korea can hardly be faulted for using the possibility of becoming a failed state as a means to collect some small change.

If Obama thought that succumbing to Pakistani demand would set no international precedent, North Korea’s ailing "dear leader" has made sure the chickens will come home to roost in Washington.

Even as America worries about Iran’s potential nuclear-weapons capability, its handling of the actual problem thrown up by Pakistan’s military-controlled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and military-nurtured terrorists threatens to send the wrong signal to Tehran. According to a just-released Congressional Research Service report, Pakistan has approximately 60 nuclear warheads. It also has biological weapons, including pathogens no less dangerous than the H1N1 virus

Bountiful U.S. aid, in fact, is allowing Pakistan to divert more of its scarce resources to expand WMD capability, as illustrated by the two new plutonium-production reactors now under construction in Khushab with Chinese assistance. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chie’s of Staff, has been constrained to acknowledge at a May 14 congressional hearing that there is evidence showing Pakistan is expanding its nuclear arsenal.

Existing WMD in a country with jihadists are a matter of deep global concern; an expanding arsenal makes the scenario terrifying.

America has little incentive to start the flow of major international aid to North Korea, which, as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted recently at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, poses no direct military threat to the U.S. at present. Strategically, North Korea is of little positive value to U.S. policy.

By contrast, China over the decades has maintained close ties with Pyongyang and Islamabad and, besides providing direct WMD aid to both, may have even encouraged North Korean-Pakistani technology exchanges. But Beijing lacks the leverage to control their steps and gets surprised now and then by their actions, as exemplified by the latest North Korean nuclear and missile testing.

More broadly, the traditional carrots-and-sticks approach of the nonproliferation regime has been derailed by the North Korea and Pakistan cases. The derailment happened because the punitive component was rendered blunt by the continuing intent of the major geopolitical players not to let North Korea or Pakistan become a failed state.

So, the more North Korea and Pakistan appear likely to become failed states, the more it becomes evident that the international response is constrained by the objective not to let them fail. The international approach toward them thus is to bark but not to bite.

In dealing with North Korea, China, Russia, the United States and Japan do not want to go so far as to cause the collapse of the regime. Although not necessarily motivated by the same interest, these powers are not geopolitically ready for Korean reunification, which will be a logical corollary to the regime collapse in Pyongyang. South Korea, too, is not prepared for that development because it would unleash a torrent of refugees and saddle Seoul with colossal reunification costs, as the continuing domestic costs of German reunification attest. So, not wanting the Stalinist North Korean state to unravel, the external players do little more than pass tough resolutions or statements.

Pakistan, for its part, has for long served as a useful pawn in Chinese and American policies. It remains Beijing’s "all-weather ally," although its utility to U.S. policy has eroded to the extent that today it appears more of a strategic liability than an asset. Yet the old mind-set in Washington has not sufficiently changed. As a result, the deeper Pakistan has dug itself into a jihadist dungeon, the more the U.S. has gotten involved in that country. Such growing involvement, far from serving U.S. interests, has fueled an Islamist backlash in Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment is among the strongest in the world and where America is unfairly blamed for everything.

Washington also does not face up to another reality: Pakistan’s political border with Afghanistan has ceased to exist in practice. The so-called Durand Line — a British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two — now exists only in maps. Its disappearance is irreversible. Given that reality, how can U.S. policy expect to prop up the Pakistani state within political frontiers that, in part, no longer exist?

It is sad but true: The only way the international community can regain leverage against North Korea and Pakistan is to unflinchingly pursue a forward-thinking nonproliferation course that is not constrained by the specter of state collapse. That means standing up to them to disable their nuclear terror.