A week after Edward Snowden was granted temporary asylum in Russia, President Obama canceled his bi-lateral September summit in Moscow with Vladimir Putin, though administration officials are at pains to portray this as something greater than pure tit-for-tattery. Rather, they say, it was an excuse to avoid what, even without Snowden, would have been "a pretty dreary affair."

A few days before Snowden turned up in Moscow, Obama and Putin met on the sidelines of the G8 conference in Northern Ireland. The resulting photo-op—Obama looking forlornly into the distance, Putin slouched and sullen—said it all: they looked like the aging couple at the neighboring table, intently working on their food and eavesdropping on your conversation because they had nothing to support one of their own. Moscow and Washington had talked and talked, they'd gotten START and the transport route to Afghanistan and the sanctions on Iran, but now, the kids are out of the house and they were talking past each other on Syria, on Iran, on pretty much everything. The one ray of light that June day was Putin and Obama signing a non-proliferation agreement to replace the expired Nunn-Lugar deal, but then Putin quickly an end to hopes that this would lead to more talks on arms control. He was done with what he said were overly "intrusive" agreements for the time being.

This came on the heels of a deep and bitter disagreement over Syria—Americans (rightly) accused the Russians of propping up Assad, and the Russians (rightly) accused the Americans of being dangerously naive on a post-Assad Syria—over Iran, and over Libya, where the Russians felt they had been duped into giving the Americans far more latitude militarily than they had intended to.

By the time the Snowden scandal broke, the White House was furious, yes, but the incident also seemed to trigger a deeper reevalution of the Russian-American relationship inside the administration and State. What people were now talking about was not just Snowden, but, as some people from the foreign policy team phrased it, "what's left of the relationship."

And yet, when news came from Washington that the September summit wasn't happening, that Washington thought it would be best for a break if not a total break up, Russia's response was muted and hurt.