LAVROV, AT AGE 63, is already the longest-serving of Russia's post-Cold War foreign ministers. Hard-drinking, hard-charging, a relentless and smart negotiator who has by turns infuriated and impressed his many diplomatic interlocutors over the years, he has come, more than anyone perhaps aside from Putin himself, to personify Russia's return to the world stage.
Whatever you think of Lavrov personally -- "he's a complete asshole," one former official from George W. Bush's administration told me bluntly -- it's his relentless willingness to take on the United States globally, to challenge, whenever and wherever possible, America's view of itself as the indispensable power, that has earned him admirers among his often more tactful counterparts. "He's certainly got to be among the most effective foreign ministers in the world today," the foreign minister of another major emerging power told me not long ago.
This resurgent Russia may have far fewer diplomatic tools at its disposal than its Soviet predecessor, but Lavrov has figured out how to leverage them to maximum advantage, first as Russia's ambassador to the United Nations for a decade and, since 2004, as foreign minister. At the United Nations, "his two objectives were always the same: veto things for the greater glory of Russia and to take the Americans down whenever possible," recalled John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who served alongside him on the Security Council. It's still Lavrov's playbook now, back in the Stalinist skyscraper on Moscow's Garden Ring.
To the Americans with whom he has clashed, that makes Lavrov a sort of sophisticated Soviet retread in an Italian suit, an updated Mr. Nyet, as Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was dubbed for the relish with which he frequently deployed the veto at the Security Council in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s. "He's a modern version of Mr. No, a latter-day Gromyko," said David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration and now head of the U.S. democracy-promotion group Freedom House. "Like Russians in general, he wants respect, so they look for ways to exercise the veto," agreed Kramer's onetime boss, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "Unfortunately, Russia has no positive ways to exercise power right now, so it's negative," she told me.
But to many others, Lavrov's endless capacity for defying the Americans is exactly the point. Russia may have few true friends in its weakened, post-Soviet state -- long gone are the generous, regime-propping subsidies from Moscow, the sweetened arms sales and the spigots of aid for fellow travelers -- but there are many emerging powers who cheer (if often behind closed doors) Lavrov's willingness to defy the superpower, to poke and prod it with evidence of hypocrisy and self-righteousness. To simply say: No.
Both those who silently root for Russia and those who deplore the Kremlin's hard turn tend to see in Lavrov a global alternative to the American way. But he's not your grandfather's America-hater.
After Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in last year's U.S. election, called Russia the "No. 1 geopolitical foe" of the United States, Lavrov publicly mocked such "Cold War black-and-white thinking" as "absurd." And when we met, Lavrov deftly fended off any suggestion of the United States as Russia's "adversary" -- this in spite of a brand-new Russian foreign-policy "concept," issued by Putin just weeks before, that proclaims the central role of Russia in the world as one of balancing. Against what, I asked Lavrov, are you balancing if not the United States? He did not answer.
His response came in different form later in the interview. "I don't believe in ideology in international relations," Lavrov said. "I started, you know, to work as a diplomat during the Soviet days, and in spite of ideology being very high on the Communist Party agenda, I can assure you that in practical terms we have always been trying to be pragmatic. And this is the case now."
It's certainly not a positive conception of the world; you will never hear a visionary speech from Lavrov or pleas for brotherhood, and he most decidedly does not wax poetic about anything (despite what a friend told me is his hobby of writing Russian verse). Clearly, he believes Americans are hopeless idealists, and he loves to tweak them about it, whether reminding them about the overblown initial hopes for the Arab Spring or jabbing them with evidence of how their interventions in the Middle East, from Iraq to Libya, have backfired.
But his primary mission is not America-bashing -- it is Russia-promoting. "He is Mr. Nyet in the eyes of Americans. But actually he's not Gromyko; he's not Primakov. It was wrong," a longtime Russian colleague of Lavrov's told me when we met in Moscow. "Lavrov's toughness comes from a very patriotic stance. He thinks there was lost time in the '90s.… He thought the '90s were humiliation for Russia, and his ambition is to restore the profile of Russia, its foreign policy."
In other words, being against America is a tactic for Lavrov, not a strategy. "If he has any moral compass, my Geiger counter hasn't clicked into it," said Negroponte. "His morality is the Russian state."
For the last two years, Lavrov has dramatically elevated his profile on the world stage. He has done so by almost single-handedly defying Western attempts to force some united action to stop Syria's deadly civil war. To Americans and Europeans appalled by the carnage -- there are already 70,000 dead and an estimated 3 million people driven from their homes -- Lavrov is a nasty if effective shill for the tyrannical Assad regime, a major Russian-arms customer representing the last vestige of Soviet power in the Middle East. By that reasoning, if Lavrov can be made to see Assad's case as hopeless, he can be made to give up on supporting him. But every Russian with whom I spoke for this article, from Lavrov himself to the most fervent political foes of the Putin government, had a different explanation: Lavrov's fight to block Western intervention in Syria is not about Syria but about Russia. It is about the principle that matters above all else to Lavrov and his boss in the Kremlin -- that Russia should be allowed to do whatever it wants on its own turf. Brutal crackdowns on protesters, crushing internal rebellions, anything it takes.
When we met, I asked Lavrov about why the Americans kept thinking they would change his position on Syria, coming back to him again and again with new proposals that he promptly rebuffed. After a few sentences of reflection, he pulled a small white piece of paper out of his pocket. It was a quote from Alexander Gorchakov that he had brought expressly to share with me. "Foreign intervention into the domestic matters is unacceptable," he read. "It is unacceptable to use force in international relations, especially by the countries who consider themselves leaders of civilization."
Boris Yelenin/AFP/GettyImages
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