We ought to make a distinction, one that seems to elude the cognoscenti who keep warning us that U.S.-Russia relations are once again nearing an all-time low: There is the Russian people—the narod—and there is the power, the vlast. When we speak of “Moscow” or “the Kremlin” or “U.S.-Russia relations,” we are speaking of the power, which does not apprehend the world the way democratically elected governments do. That is because the Kremlin is a criminal enterprise, a sprawling multinational octopus propelled not by concerns with or visions of Russia but by its own preservation. If there is a single theme that illuminates the whole of Russian literature, this is it: the Russian people asserting its authenticity, its claim to an independent interiority, in the face of a state that has been alienated from it. This is utterly foreign to the American. The American gets angry with the government because he thinks the government ought to represent him; it ought to protect his life and liberty; it ought to further his interests. The American demonstrates, marches, tweets angry threads about the president’s latest insult to democracy. The Russian cannot really fathom a state that represents. He understands it in theory, of course, but not in practice. He’s not angry. He's resigned.

This is important because one cannot really enjoy good relations, whatever is meant by that, with the Mafia. One can do business with them, but that necessarily entails a defiling of the spirit, and that is a price Washington (meaning the deeply flawed but democratically elected representatives of the American people) has been willing to pay—to win World War II or, more recently, secure the right of U.S. forces to travel through Russian airspace en route to Afghanistan. That’s what adults do—they make moral calculations—and that’s good and necessary. They do not, however, forget that the people with whom they are doing business are lesser, criminal—illegitimate.

But in the euphoria of the early 1990s, that is what happened in Washington, and we have never really reclaimed our focus. There have been moments of lucidity—shocks to our collective but misplaced optimism—but those have been moments (Anna Politkovskaya’s murder in 2006; the invasion of Ukraine in 2014). They have been eclipsed by our desire to believe that the only things that really separated the United States and Russia were superficial: the food we eat, the language we speak, the shape and color of the buildings we live in. We have not understood what the Russians, the vlast and the narod, have always understood— that there is a cognitive-cultural universe between us and them, and we can work inside those parameters, we can make temporary, if common, cause, but we cannot bridge them.

This latest rupture in U.S.-Russian relations presents the White House with a chance to dispense with the fictions and build a more durable relationship and world order. This president will not do that. He’s incapable of thinking in abstract terms like “relationship” or “order.” Of course, we knew this already. More intriguing, more unknown, are the politicos and tycoons who fashion themselves the 46th president of the United States. One wonders if they will transcend the old divisions and stupidities. It is possible to be adversarial but not engaged in a cold war. (One wonders if they will watch subtitled episodes of The Blonde in Chocolate. They should count on Sobchak running, and maybe winning, next time around.) The next American president will have to see things clearly—coldly. This president will inhabit a more dangerous environment, one in which the old assumptions have been overturned by the current president. This president will not inherit the traditions that the current president inherited, because those traditions will no longer be so certain; they will be echoes of the way things were. This president will need to make up for the unraveling taking place right now.