Coddling the Bear: Robert Lane Greene parses a third of Condi Rice's (attributed) statement on post-Iraq foreign relations, "Punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia." He makes a good argument that her realism has firm roots. Russia's economy is the fastest growing of the three:

Indeed, basket-case though Russia may be, the realist Russian-affairs scholar who serves as the president's national security advisor could give her boss plenty of reasons why the country still warrants the benefit of the doubt. And they are hard-nosed, pragmatic ones. The first is economic. Since its 1998 collapse and debt default, the Russian economy has rebounded strongly, growing by an average of 6.4 percent per year between 1999 and 2002, as compared to 2.6 percent in the United States (and 2.7 percent and 1.4 percent in France and Germany, respectively) over the same period. This year the finance ministry expects a net capital inflow into the country for the first time since 1991, reflecting growing investor confidence spurred on in part by reforms of the still-unwieldy tax code and bureaucracy. Corporate governance is also sharply improving.

And, he mentions, Russia has a lot of oil. France and Germany have little to offer in comparison, and trade with the EU will only prove to be more of a bureaucratic nightmare than trade with France or Germany is now. Russia is the new new frontier, with vast unexploited natural resources and plenty of available labor. Plus, the influence of the black market there means that everyone is pretty familiar with practical capitalism.