Andrei Kozyrev had devised a rather subtle game plan to prevent next week's Yeltsin-Clinton meeting from becoming the most contentious summit since the collapse of the Soviet Union.


Kozyrev faced three looming international crises. The first is the war in Chechnya, with its gruesome reminder that human rights remain a diplomatic minefield. This was supposed to have been pushed onto the back burner by a truce agreement.


The second is Russian opposition to the expansion of NATO, and the repeated demands of Defense Minister Pavel Grachev to renegotiate the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, to allow Russia to reinforce its troops in eastern Russia and the Caucasus. Kozyrev hoped to reach a deal, getting American agreement to a renegotiation of the CFE treaty on the troop equipment levels in the Caucasus region, in return for some emollient words about NATO expansion.


And finally, Kozyrev did not take seriously the American concern about the nuclear technology and power station deal with Iran. Asked this week what it would take to get Russia to cancel the contract, he quipped "about $1.5 billion." The joke did not go down well in Washington.


Kozyrev believes his own scientists, who say the Iranians will get no material advantage from the deal in their effort to develop nuclear weapons. After all, it is not in Moscow's interest for a new nuclear power to emerge near its unstable southern borders.


The Kozyrev strategy began to fail when the war in Chechnya flared up again this week, just as the Americans had warned him it would. Also, the Americans were hardly unprepared for a softer line from Moscow on NATO expansion. The Hungarians have already reported to Washington that during their last Kremlin talks, Yeltsin said he was comfortable with their joining the NATO alliance.


Then Kozyrev massively underestimated the strength of American opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. President Clinton's announcement this week of a full-scale U.S. economic embargo on Iran is deadly serious. And it was accompanied by Secretary of State Warren Christopher declaring that he would be putting pressure on America's G-7 partners -- "in the strongest terms" -- to support the embargo.


Finally, the Americans do not take Kozyrev seriously any more. They are fed up with what they say is his pattern of sounding reasonable in private, and bellicose in public.


"We know Kozyrev has been under a lot of pressure for a long time, but are not even sure he is entirely sane any more," confided one senior U.S. official. "There are behavior patterns that are off the wall. Hour-long monologues. Wierd and maudlin stuff. If there was a Nobel prize for self-pity, this guy would get it."


Last month in Copenhagen, this bizarre version of a Russian foreign minister was on public and pitiful display. Some of those present thought he was drunk. Kozyrev rambled on about the West's responsibility for force-feeding Russian nationalism and warned that U.S. and European policies were condemning him to the gulag.


Maybe it was just a desperate piece of diplomatic dramatics that backfired. But this is no way to prepare what looks to be the most important US-Russian summit since the Berlin Wall came down.