Well, that didn’t take long.

Barely 24 hours after Tuesday’s election, even as Americans were still taking the full measure of Barack Obama‘s historic victory, Russia’s leaders may well have advanced the foreign-policy test so widely predicted by Vice President-elect Joe Biden.

Vladimir Putin – speaking through his ventriloquist’s dummy of a president, Dmitri Medvedev – threatened to station short-range Iskander missiles in the enclave of Kaliningrad, which lies between Poland and Lithuania.

The move is negotiable, he suggested: America must abandon plans – announced by President Bush – to install a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“Mechanisms must be created to block mistaken, egotistical and sometimes simply dangerous decisions of certain members of the international community,” said Medvedev in his annual speech to the Russian Federal Assembly, Moscow’s equivalent of the State of the Union Address.

Indeed, he added, “from what we have seen in recent years, the creation of a missile-defense system, the encirclement of Russia with military bases, the relentless expansion of NATO, we have gotten the clear impression that they are testing our strength.”

So Medvedev and Putin have decided to launch their own test of strength.

And who better to test than an incoming president of the United States – especially one whose initial reaction to Russia’s brutal invasion of Georgia was both confused and vacillating?

So what will the president-elect do?

Obama is entitled to his own views on missile defense, of course – though just what they might be wasn’t made clear during the campaign.

Though skeptical of the huge cost of missile defense, he was supportive of the system scheduled for Poland and the Czech Republic. But he also said that deployment should be delayed until the system is fully tested to prove its effectiveness – which would delay it for years.

This lack of clarity has constrained his options: He may not want to pursue an anti-missile program, but seeming to give in to the Medvedev-Putin bullying will only encourage the Kremlin to push even harder.

This won’t be the only test that Obama will face early on. But he needs to see it for what it is, and to respond appropriately.