There are two kinds of Russia hands, or maybe there are six kinds of Russia hands, or maybe there is an infinite variety of Russia hands. And yet the mystery is this: After all the many different Russia hands who have served in the United States government, the country’s relations with Russia are as they have always been — bad.

The Cold War ended with a bang in the U.S.S.R. — new countries were forged, the ghosts of the past were confronted, a McDonald’s opened in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. In the United States, there was also much hope. A sometime Russia hand named Francis Fukuyama, then deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, even wrote an essay in which he wondered if we were entering a new post-historical era, when the great questions of how to order society had been settled and all would live in a stable, if boring, peace.

The first high-level Russia hand of the post-Cold War era was a man named Nelson Strobridge Talbott III, or Strobe for short. The scion of a prosperous Ohio family (his grandfather, the first Nelson Strobridge Talbott, was captain of the Yale football team in 1914), Talbott followed his forefathers to Yale, where he studied Russian literature and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. There he found himself rooming with a wonky, gregarious Georgetown graduate named Bill Clinton. Talbott remained interested in Russia, writing his master’s thesis on Mayakovsky, translating Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs and then becoming a foreign correspondent — and eventually a columnist — for Time magazine. He was the first journalist to track down and interview Joseph Brodsky upon his exile to the West in 1972. “Looks like we lucked out,” Brodsky wrote in his diary. “He’s read me.” Talbott’s fundamental view of the U.S.S.R. was that it could be reasoned with; in the pages of Time, he regularly praised the virtues of arms control and détente, and was despised for it by more ardent Cold Warriors. When Clinton was elected president, Talbott came on to advise his old roommate on what Clinton believed to be his most pressing foreign-policy concern: the transformation of Russia into a viable, American-friendly democracy on the eastern edge of Europe.

Things did not turn out that way, and most of the reasons were internal to Russia. But the United States was not without its share of blame. The economic advice dispensed by the gurus of what was known as the Washington Consensus weakened an already vulnerable Russian state. Average Russian citizens saw their living standards and life expectancies drop. It was Talbott who offered one of the pithier critiques of the doctrine known as “shock therapy”: What the Russian people wanted, Talbott said, “was less shock and more therapy.” The remark led to one of the stormiest passages of his political career.

But he weathered it. During his tenure, the United States made one of the most momentous foreign-policy choices of the post-1991 era: the decision to expand NATO eastward, first into the former countries of the Warsaw Pact, then into the former republics of the Soviet Union itself. Talbott at first was opposed, or at least, as he now puts it, “deeply riven.” On one hand, the Eastern European countries, some of which were now led by heroic former dissidents, wanted very much to join the military alliance; on the other, the Russians warned Talbott — “with a mirthless smile,” as he later recalled — that NATO was to them a “four-letter word.” If the Cold War was really over, as the Americans kept saying it was, why expand a Cold War military alliance set up expressly to deter and contain the Soviet Union? But as much as Talbott loved Russia, there were clear advantages to securing the West’s gains. “If the leadership of a country has any view but the following,” Talbott told me last summer, “it’s not going to be the leadership of that county for very long. And that is: We do what we can in our own interest.” But the NATO question, Talbott admitted, was complicated. “Should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on what many people would say is our own current interest?”

At the time the debate was taking place — 1993 and 1994 — much of the State Department and the Pentagon took the anti-expansion view, arguing that it would needlessly antagonize Russia at a difficult moment in its post-Communist journey and that the alliance was unwieldy enough without incorporating three fledgling Eastern European democracies (not to mention, eventually, Romania). But there were some who disagreed. A small working group at RAND produced a report arguing for NATO expansion as key to the future of Eastern Europe. “We talked to the Poles, and they said: ‘If you don’t let us into NATO, we’re getting nuclear weapons. We don’t trust the Russians,’ ” one of the report’s authors, a former Air Force officer and Pentagon strategist named Richard L. Kugler, told me. “Then we talked to the Germans. They said: ‘The line of contact with the Russians now runs through Warsaw. If you don’t defend it, we will.’ We had a vision of a nuclear-armed Poland being fortified by German troops facing off with the Russians — I don’t think anyone wanted that!” The report was laughed at and rejected in some quarters — a State Department official supposedly threw it in the trash in front of one of its authors — but Fried, then at the National Security Council, started using it to lobby inside the administration for a more robust approach to expansion. Talbott initially resisted, but he and Clinton soon came around.

The decision on NATO was essentially made by early 1994, but it would take some years before the first countries joined the alliance, and in the meantime, relations between Russia and the United States steadily declined: Russia was angered by the NATO bombing of Bosnian Serb positions in 1995, by the American insistence that the Russians stop the sale of nuclear technology to Iran and especially by the 1999 NATO bombing — just a few weeks after the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland finally joined the alliance — of Belgrade. That conflict almost expanded when a small contingent of Russian troops seized the Pristina airport in Kosovo. If a British officer named James Blunt had not refused to act on an order from Gen. Wesley Clark to clear the airport, things might have turned out a lot worse. Blunt went on to fame as a rock musician with the hit song “You’re Beautiful,” but the Russia-United States relationship remained precarious.