In his new book, “The Back Channel,” William J. Burns, a career diplomat and foreign-service officer, makes the case for American diplomacy in a very undiplomatic age. Burns, who served in both Republican and Democratic Administrations for three decades, notably as President George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Russia between 2005 and 2008, narrates America’s post-Cold War foreign policy through the lens of his dealings with dictators, Secretaries of State, and Presidents, from George H. W. Bush to Barack Obama. The spectre of the current President looms over the book: Burns sees Donald Trump as a force that is destroying American credibility, and diminishing the country’s ability to function effectively in the world.

Burns, who now runs the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, refers to himself as a “card-carrying member of the Washington establishment.” (His book was blurbed by Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, and Henry Kissinger.) But to what degree is Trump’s rise the result of mistakes, such as the war in Iraq, that were made by that very establishment? To discuss that question, I recently spoke by phone with Burns. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we talked about his impressions of Vladimir Putin, the biggest danger of Trump’s foreign policy, and the extent to which the U.S. has historically been interested in human rights.

In the book, you present Putin and the Russians around him as very angry about the way they feel they’ve been treated by the United States in the post–Cold War era. You express a certain sympathy for that view. But, when you look back on the last two decades of Putin, do you feel that American behavior could have actually changed him, or do you feel that this is a cover story for his own behavior, even if he was sincerely annoyed?

Certainly, over the course of my three and a half decades as a diplomat, [Americans] often tended to exaggerate our centrality in other countries’ or other leaderships’ considerations. I think there was a certain extent to which it was always going to be difficult for Russians, after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, to accept what was, in effect, junior-partner status to a then singularly dominant United States.

I think they were always going to chafe at that. There was and remains a sense on the part of lots of people in the Russian political élite, not just Putin himself, that the West and the United States took advantage of Russia’s moment of historical weakness in Yeltsin’s Russia in the nineties. None of that is a justification for the aggressiveness that Putin has demonstrated in recent years. None of that is a justification for swallowing up part of the Ukraine. But I do think both of us operated under certain illusions—the Russian illusion that somehow they were going to be accepted, even though the power realities had changed enormously, as a peer, as a full partner, and the American illusion that we could always maneuver over or around Russia. There was bound to be a time when they were going to push back. I’m not a fatalist about history, but I think a certain amount of friction and a certain number of collisions were built into the equation.

What was something specific the United States could have done in the last twenty years that would have changed things in some way for the better?

I think, on the margins, it was a mistake to have, in a sense, remained on autopilot with regard to NATO expansion in 2008, when we pushed open the door for formal NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. I think that fed Putin’s narrative that the United States was out to keep Russia down, to undermine Russia and what he saw to be its entitlement, its sphere of influence. I think it’s not so much that that provided an excuse for what Putin later did in Ukraine. He was perfectly capable of doing that on his own, because Putin’s view of Ukraine, I think, has always been that first prize is a deferential government in Kiev. If you can’t have that, the next best thing is a dysfunctional Ukraine. But I think our efforts in 2008 helped him reinforce his narrative at home. He always used that narrative of “enemies at the gate,” in particular the United States, to justify what is a deeply repressive political system at home.

You’ve met a lot of people who I imagine have somewhat authoritarian personalities.

Yeah.

I’m curious how Putin differs or doesn’t differ from the typical way we imagine an authoritarian personality, because you had many dealings with him.

One theme that runs across all of them, at least in my experience, is a deep mistrust of just about everybody around them. It’s true of lots of other authoritarians I dealt with, including the profoundly weird, like Muammar Qaddafi.

I always saw Putin as a combustible combination of grievance and ambition and insecurity, and all those three wrapped up together, in a way. The insecurity part is not something that he likes people to see easily, because he projects this kind of bare-chested persona to the rest of the world and to his own population. But there is, and it has roots in Russian history, this sense of insecurity about threats from the outside and threats from within his own society.

I would argue that history’s judgment is going to be that he’s added to that sense of insecurity. By swallowing up a couple of million Crimeans, he’s insured that there are forty-two million other Ukrainians who never again want to accept a deferential role toward Russia. I think he missed the moment when he could have begun to diversify the economy beyond what comes out of the ground, beyond hydrocarbons, when he was surfing on a-hundred-and-thirty-dollar-a-barrel oil, and he missed because economic diversification took second place to political order. I think that’s going to make it increasingly hard for Russia to compete as a major power in a very competitive twenty-first century.

When you were serving overseas, did you find that the way foreign governments or foreign leaders related to you had more to do with the particular position you held at the time, or with the particular position of America in the world at whatever time it was?

It had a lot to do with their perception of America in the world. I worked with Secretary of State [James] Baker, and that was a moment when the United States really stood as the unrivalled major power in the world. I don’t mean that as a statement of arrogance. It was just a fact at the end of the Cold War. There was a certain respect that came with that simple power reality. But I’ve also thought that, for individual diplomats, whether it’s when I played junior roles or as Ambassador, how you conduct yourself matters, too. I’ve always felt we get a lot further in the world with the power of our example than we do with the power of our preaching. Americans can sometimes, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, be awfully patronizing overseas.