This mistrust of America helped propel the political rise of Putin, who came to power by promising he would permit no further disintegration of the old Russian empire. Since then, the United States has tended to encourage Russian suspicions by generally treating "Russia as heir to the U.S.S.R.'s policies and objectives," Leslie Gelb and Dimitri Simes, two highly respected foreign policy analysts, wrote in an article in The National Interest last year. The United States and Europe, they argued, have created "an impression that the West's top priorities, long after the Cold War, include not merely containing Russia but also transforming it."

National Journal

The pattern of misreading Russia was not confined to the 1990s. Following September 11, the Bush administration may have misunderstood Putin in at least one crucial respect. "He had expected that in return for supporting the U.S., at least in the beginning of the war on terror, we would recognize a Russian sphere of influence," says Angela Stent, a former Sovietologist at Georgetown University. We did not, of course, recognize such a sphere. And, all the while, Putin's power inside Russia was growing based on a resurgence of nationalism.

But if some believe that the United States was too high-handed toward Russia during the 1990s and early 2000s, there is also a view that Obama went too far in the other direction—by taking too accommodating a posture toward Russia during the early years of his administration. One specific mistake may have been investing too much hope in Dmitry Medvedev, who succeeded Putin as president in 2008. "I think a problem in the Obama administration is that the reset was very much predicated on the relationship between Medvedev and Obama, even though they understood that strings were being pulled by Putin. Medvedev did appear to be younger, not a product of the Cold War," Stent says.

Yet Medvedev's interlude was brief, and it was soon clear that Putin was going to be back in charge. In the view of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, U.S. officials bought into their own press about Obama's transformative powers and the wonders of global integration—and wished Russia into a more benign place than it really was. Instead, with its broken economy and political system, and 20 years of pent-up anger over what Soviet revanchists and Putinistas considered Western perfidy in exploiting Russia's weakness after the Cold War, it was becoming something very different.

In an interview with National Journal, Brzezinski, the 86-year-old dean of Democratic foreign policy wise men, said that too few Russia experts in the government today have a historical memory of the "darker side" of Russian society and politics. "We don't have in the administration, on the strategic level, people with a good sense of history," Brzezinski said. "Very few people in the upper echelons were dealing with the Soviet times 25 years ago.… The younger ones who came up were dealing not with former Soviets but with a whole new generation. They didn't ask to what extent that generation internalized the earlier historical phase: the whole experience of the Second World War, the instability that followed, the brutality of the Soviets. And then this move toward nationalism."

While one of the main criticisms of the Bush administration was that it was overstocked with Cold Warriors who did not understand the nature of transnational terrorism after 9/11, some critics suggest that the Obama administration has the opposite problem: It is top-heavy with counterterrorism and counterinsurgency experts who didn't pay sufficient attention to traditional state-on-state conflict, and especially Russia.