Stephen J. Hadley, who was President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, said it would be harder to recover from this clash than in the past because Mr. Putin is effectively rejecting the international order established after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “He wants to rewrite the history that emerged at the end of the Cold War,” Mr. Hadley said. “We have fundamentally different approaches to what Europe is going to be.”

At the White House on Tuesday, President Obama plotted his next moves, a tit-for-tat response of additional sanctions to penalize Russia for what Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., speaking in Warsaw, described as “nothing more than a land grab.” In private moments, administration officials recognize that the chances of prying Crimea loose from Russia are minimal and that the real question is whether the West can stop Mr. Putin from destabilizing or even trying to take control of eastern Ukraine.

Even if the United States and Europe can draw that line, it is hard to see the relationship returning to business as usual in the short term. The steady integration of Russia into the international community, culminating with its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2012 with Mr. Obama’s help, headed into reverse on Tuesday as the United States and six other industrial powers decided to meet next week as the Group of 7, effectively ending the Group of 8 that Russia joined in 1998.

Secretary of State John Kerry said Mr. Putin’s speech announcing the Crimean annexation “just didn’t jibe with reality.” Even though Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine, he told a town hall audience, “that doesn’t legitimize just taking what you want because you want it or because you’re angry about the end of the Cold War or the end of the Soviet Union, or whatever it is.”