Whatever Putin may be saying now about not wanting to harm ''the business-like character of our relations with the U.S.," it is evident that Russia's foreign policy is largely shaped by its leader's desire to meddle with America and its designs around the world. That is true whether the issue is Syria (with Putin backing Bashar al-Assad against the U.S.-aided rebels); Iran (where Moscow opposes too-stringent sanctions and is building a reactor); or missile defense (where Putin pressured President Obama to retreat from a missile-defense system, angering the Poles and the Czech Republic). Above all, Putin was incensed by the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law named after a murdered Russian lawyer under which the U.S. government can penalize Russian human-rights abuses. And he has built his entire rise to power on the idea of resurrecting the prestige and geopolitical impact of his former employer--the USSR -- if not exactly its communist system.

Some Russia experts say the truth is even simpler than that: Putin is essentially still the street tough he was when he was raised in the poor section of St. Petersburg. From the time he was known as the no-nonsense deputy mayor of that city, his worldview has been mostly shaped by that upbringing and his career in the KGB, when his job was to find ways to oppose U.S. power and influence.

Through its own policies, Washington has often encouraged this rather retrograde viewpoint and policy as well as Russian mistrust, some scholars have argued. In the decade after the Soviet Union's collapse in late 1991, the United States offered up a lot of poor economic advice -- high-minded tinkering by the free-market consultants at the Harvard Institute for International Development, as well as the IMF. Citing their Western-trained advisors, both former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, confidently predicted a two-year transition to a market economy. It all went horribly sour: Privatization of the former communist production system quickly degenerated into what the Russians called "grabitization," the unfair seizure of old state assets by party apparatchiks-turned-oligarchs with insider connections. Coming at a time when the U.S. was also seeking to peel off parts of the old Soviet Bloc by expanding NATO eastward, the economic results were so devastating that conspiracy theories sprang up about how the bad advice was just another American plot.

That era of mistrust of America led directly to era of Putin. Since then, despite various attempts at what former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called a "reset" of relations, the U.S. has tended to encourage Russian suspicions by generally treating "Russia as heir to the USSR's policies and objectives," Leslie Gelb and Dimitri Simes write in a new article in The National Interest. "Thus did NATO expand to incorporate not only the former Warsaw Pact [nations aligned with the USSR] but also the three Baltic states. And it has declared its intent to admit Ukraine and Georgia. More broadly, in almost every dispute between Russia and other former Soviet states, even with the authoritarian and repressive Belarus, the United States and the European Union have sided with Moscow's opponents. This creates an impression that the West's top priorities, long after the Cold War, include not merely containing Russia but also transforming it."