Having failed to block war in Iraq, China and Russia are retooling strategies to attenuate US dominance and ensure that Washington cannot override their interests with impunity in the future, experts say.

Both states remain committed to closer relations with the United States, yet both were also deeply dismayed by Washington's handling of the crisis and are less inclined to pursue US ties at high cost to other national interests.

For China, this may translate into a more muscular assertion of its role as the dominant Asia-Pacific power while Russia can be expected to reiterate its geostrategic value as a nuclear power straddling several ancient civilisations.

"China is above all keeping its eye on the consequences of Iraq for the Asia region," said Francois Godement, director of the Asia centre at the Institut

Francais des Relations Internationales (IFRI), a Paris think tank.

"China would like to consolidate relations with the United States, but is also very pragmatic and determined to defend what it regards as its own interests," Godement explained.

This was evident the day hostilities broke out in Iraq: while predictably condemning the US-led war, Beijing also seized the occasion to fire off warnings to North Korea, Japan and Taiwan on how it expected them to behave.

A similar reaction occurred in Russia: after an expected blast of vitriol directed at the United States, Moscow said it was delaying ratification of a nuclear disarmament treaty and soon thereafter test-fired a strategic missile.

Moscow said the timing of the missile test was unrelated to the Iraq crisis. But many see in these and other developments nascent and none-too-

subtle policy recalibrations to remind Washington that other big players remain on the stage.

"For the United States, the Iraq crisis has been purely and simply about Iraq," said Steven Miller, director of the international security program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in the United States.

"But for Russia, China and much of the world the crisis was at least as much about the United States, about what kind of role the United States would play in the world and whether the United States would play by the rules.

"Contending with American power is, I think they believe, more important than dealing with Iraq," Miller said.

For China and Russia, as well as India, France, Germany and other powerful states, this contending with American power is producing new, "outside the box" foreign policy thinking that may influence the world for

generations to come.

Writing Sunday in The New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman posited for example that a transformed NATO, where Russia gradually supplants France, would emerge as the guarantor of a western-oriented "World of Order" in years ahead.

Experts say Moscow's hard line with Washington on Iraq is predicated by core interest in an orderly world, an interest that could be met by a NATO-like alliance provided Russia had a seat at any top table within it.

"The delay in ratification of the treaty was not so much to send a message to Washington as for internal reasons, " said Viktor Baranovksy, deputy director of Russia's Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO).

"Russia has an interest in a more orderly world. The current mechanisms for bringing this about are few and not

very effective. If in the future NATO becomes that mechanism, that could be very good for Russia," Baranovksy said.

Though measurably more cautious in its official rhetoric, China is also on the lookout for new alliances or institutional mechanisms that would level the playing field more with the United States in managing global affairs.

Tang Shi Ping, deputy director of the Center for Regional Security Studies at China's Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, voiced China's anxiety over US global power and called for a new "axis of restraint" to offset it, playing on US President George W. Bush's term "axis of evil."

China, Russia and other powerful states "must form an axis of restraint" whose purposes could include military support for Iran to check US control of the Persian Gulf, Tang wrote last month in Singapore's The Straits Times daily.