Biden WSJ interview, Part III: We Hear a Gaffe, Russia Sees a Plot -- Russian proverb: “What a sober man has on his mind, a drunk puts on his tongue."

A 7-25-09 post was entitled: "Whoa! Were all of these remarks cleared with the boss? -- Biden Says Weakened Russia Will Bend to U.S."

A 7-28-09 post was entitled "I understand Russia being confused. Was it Biden's big mouth again or a good cop-bad cop move? Regardless, Biden remarks weren't smart foreign policy."

Today The New York Times reports:

AFTER Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal portraying Russia as a limping and humbled nation, many in Washington responded last week with a helpless shrug: There’s crazy Joe, they said, the guy who once told a wheelchair-bound state senator to stand up for a round of applause.

But in Russia, they weren’t shrugging. Within hours, a top Kremlin aide had released a barbed statement comparing Mr. Biden to Dick Cheney. Commentators announced Mr. Biden’s emergence as Washington’s new “gray cardinal” — the figure who, from the shadows, makes all the decisions that matter. Others said Washington’s mask had been torn off, revealing Mr. Obama’s “reset” as at best insubstantial and at worst duplicitous.

American officials spent several days trying to convince their Russian counterparts that Mr. Biden’s words were, for lack of a better label, a gaffe. Russia’s highest officials have kept silent on the matter, but their initial responses were skeptical.

“Biden has said this in such a way that the whole world heard it,” said Alexei K. Pushkov, who is the anchor of the current events show “Post-Scriptum.” “And then there are secret, furtive calls in the night, dragging Russian officials from their supper. They want to say this is not true. But somehow everybody still thinks it is.”

Among the reasons for their skepticism: In today’s Russia, politicians just don’t run off at the mouth. Not so long ago, Russian public life was a symphony of embarrassing episodes. Remember when Boris Yeltsin confused Norway with Sweden, suggested that Germany and Japan had nuclear arsenals, and toppled over while saluting an honor guard in Uzbekistan?

That all ended with the presidency of Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin, now Russia’s prime minister, occasionally departs from statesmanlike language, as when he threatened to hang the Georgian president by his testicles or offered a French reporter an especially thorough circumcision. But coming from Mr. Putin, these statements are expressions of Russian might, something like a political philosophy — never, ever mistakes.

For anyone subordinate to the president to allow themselves that freedom is inconceivable, said Vladimir V. Pozner, the host of a talk show on state television.

“If it’s not the No. 1 man or woman, clearly that person has been instructed to say what he or she said,” Mr. Pozner said. “It’s psychologically very difficult for a Russian to believe otherwise. If you write in The New York Times whatever you write, I’m sure Mr. Putin will say, ‘Of course. It was ordered.’ ”

It will also be hard to convince the Kremlin that the comments don’t indicate a deeper drama. Russians have spent months searching for clues to Mr. Obama’s true intentions; when Mr. Obama killed a fly during a television interview shortly before traveling to Moscow, for example, several analysts here interpreted it as a message to Russia.

Mr. Biden has now supplied evidence for two plotlines — a deep rift within the administration, or a “sophisticated game,” said Andrei V. Ryabov, a political analyst at Moscow’s Carnegie Center. This ambiguity, he said, plays into the conviction of Mr. Putin and his team that real events take place far from view, among a handful of powerful individuals, and that public politics are “no more than puppetry, decoration in the theater.”

“Nothing accidental can happen in this system,” Mr. Ryabov said. “Everything has a hidden meaning.” Even accidental words from officials are likely to be read closely; as a Russian proverb has it, “What a sober man has on his mind, a drunk puts on his tongue.”

Mr. Pushkov was among those who put little credence in Mr. Obama’s overtures, and to him, Mr. Biden’s words offer a far more honest assessment of American policy. He says he reads in them a split in Washington between cold war heavyweights and a president too weak to bring them to heel.

“It’s not just a question of schools of thought,” he said, dryly, but something far more serious. Schools of thought, he added, are something to be “exercised on a veranda with a cup of coffee on a summer evening.”

Of course, every warming of the relationship between Moscow and Washington has been a tenuous process, punctuated by false starts and furious backpedaling.

In 1974, after signing on to the idea of “peaceful coexistence,” Leonid Brezhnev seems to have been called on the carpet by a Central Committee concerned about ceding ground to the United States; he went on to repudiate two key agreements with the Americans. Jimmy Carter, under a drumbeat of criticism for caving in to Russia, halted ratification of the second strategic arms limitation treaty after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979; he explained that the invasion had changed his view of Moscow’s intentions.

This thaw seemed tentative, too, even before Mr. Biden’s words. The coming months could bring renewed fighting in Georgia, or another gas crisis with Ukraine, or a deadlock on the renegotiation of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

“At this point these were just words — unfortunate words, reckless words, but still, it was just words, not of the president but of the vice president,” said Dimitri K. Simes, the president of the Nixon Center. “The question is what is going to happen next.”