You would think Kerry has a case: As the Boston Marathon bombing incident demonstrated, Washington and Moscow do share intelligence and high concern over Islamist radicalization. Neither nation particularly wants Iran or North Korea (both of which sit just off of Russia's vast borders) to have a nuclear bomb.

So why is Putin so recalcitrant? Because to a degree that U.S. policymakers have not really acknowledged publicly, Russia under Putin has become the chief countervailing force to U.S. power and influence around the world, even more so than China (which often follows Moscow's lead in the U.N. Security Council). Mulishness toward Washington is not just an attitude; it is today Russia's foreign policy. And this goes well beyond recent tit-for-tat, including Putin's suspension of U.S. adoptions and barring of nongovernmental organizations after Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law named after a murdered Russian lawyer under which the U.S. government can penalize Russian human-rights abuses.

Washington, in fact, has been getting Putin's real aims largely wrong since George W. Bush infamously declared that he had "a sense of his soul" after their first meeting in 2001, naively adding that "the more I get to see his heart and soul ... the more I know we can work together in a positive way." In truth, in Putin's and Moscow's eyes, America has been screwing up the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq, creating more extremism around the world, and has been an especially poor steward of the international system in the aftermath of the Wall Street-generated crash of 2008. That comes after an era when Russians went from being friendly acolytes after the Cold War to a people increasingly suspicious that America's often errant free-market advice in the 1990s was largely designed to turn Russia into a second-rate power. Beyond that, Putin is clearly trying to recreate some semblance of a sphere of influence in his region that resembles that of imperial Russia and the USSR--much to the approval of the Russian public.

This is especially true when it comes to the Middle East, which will be foremost on Kerry's list this week. As Peter Eltsov, a Washington-based political analyst and a scholar of Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, wrote recently , Putin's carefully calibrated fence-sitting approach to Syria is not just a way of maintaining one of Moscow's few allies in the region (and his somewhat imaginary sphere of influence). For Putin, who by many accounts has become quasi-tsarist in his policies and views, it is also a statement of political preference. "The Russian president is trying to convey his conviction that monarchies and dictatorships are not necessarily worse than democratic forms of government," Eltsov wrote. "When asked by a Danish journalist why he called the West's involvement in Libya 'a crusade,' Putin answered didactically: 'Look at the map of the region. Are there democracies like the one in Denmark there? There are monarchical states there all over the place. It reflects the mentality of population and the customs that they have formed there.' " Eltsov added: "Nostalgia for both the USSR and czarist Russia play an increasingly important role in Russian politics."