As the international condemnation of Vladimir Putin and his actions continues unabated, I keep wondering: What if Putin were nice, rather than mean? What would a Nice Putin have done differently over the past decade and a half—or today?

Not very much at all, I think. And this should give pause to anyone who believes that Putin’s behavior is aberrant—the product of a uniquely evil or crazy mind—and that he’s leading Russians in a direction opposed to what they perceive to be their true interests. Earlier this month a British legislative committee accused Britain and the Europeans of a “catastrophic misreading” of Russia, one that naively concluded Moscow was heading down the same democratic, liberalizing road as the rest of us when in fact “Russia is increasingly defining itself … as a geopolitical and ideological competitor.” This error of judgment, the report said, caused the West to go “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis.

Yet even if the fondest dreams of these slumbering Western politicians had come true and they had encountered a Nice Putin—a hypothetically more friendly Russian leader—they would still have gotten him wrong. Russia will, one hopes, eventually change its leadership, but it is not going to be able to change its geographic location, or its historic associations, or its longstanding wish to keep the West—which hasn’t always crossed the border bearing flowers—at bay. And that holds many lessons for the future.

Let me be clear: The actual Putin is not at all nice. To take just a few examples: 1) between 1999 and 2002 he prosecuted a vicious war in Chechnya, complete with rape, torture, filtration camps and mass graves; 2) in 2003, he jailed his leading rival, the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and, when the initial sentence was almost up, extended it; 3) in 2000-01, shortly after assuming the presidency, he oversaw a government takeover of the country's main independent television channels, chasing their owners into exile; 4) over time he has enriched his friends to an astonishing degree, such that many of the leading billionaires in Russia owe their riches directly to their proximity to Putin; 5) it is becoming increasingly the consensus view that the September 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk were the work of the secret services, and it is hard to imagine that Putin, as the prime minister of Russia and, until just a month before, the head of the FSB, would not have known about them; 6) in his third term he has unleashed the worst aspects of Russian street politics, mobilizing anti-Western, anti-gay and anti-liberal resentment to shore up his domestic popularity; and 7) in 2004, supposedly as an anti-terror measure after the terrible seizure of a school in Beslan by Chechen fighters, he canceled elections for regional governors, replacing them with appointees;.

Finally, to the world’s justified outrage, in the past year Putin has annexed Crimea and fomented a war in eastern Ukraine, sending men, weapons and informational support to the rebels, even as he has repeatedly lied about it to both the international community and the Russian people. The actual Putin has blood on his hands.

But if we imagined a hypothetical Putin who was the nicest Putin possible and at the same time ruthless enough to become president when Putin did—during a period of Russian demoralization and drift—such a leader would have done only a few of these things differently.

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Consider, first, the state of things in 1998, when Putin first appeared on the scene of national politics. Boris Yeltsin's second presidential term was set to expire in 2000, and no one expected Yeltsin, who could barely stand up or talk, even to live that long, much less try to change the Constitution and run again. Realistically, there were two leading candidates to replace him. One was Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov, a longtime KGB hand (code name MAKSIM) who had served as chief of the foreign intelligence service (SVR) throughout the first half of the 1990s. He was Yeltsin's prime minister in 1998-99, during which time he began investigating some of the oligarchs and speaking out for a "strategic triangle" of Russia, India and China to counterbalance U.S. hegemony. His most famous act as prime minister may have been his decision, in May 1999, to turn around a plane full of Russian businessmen headed for the United States when he learned that NATO had started bombing Belgrade. The businessmen, in a fit of patriotism that may have presaged their eventual lock-step support of Russian imperial policies, broke out in cheers. The turn-around has since been christened "Primakov's Loop."

The other popular candidate to replace Yeltsin was Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow. Luzhkov had become popular through his regular-guy image—he was short, chubby and plain-spoken and often wore a little peasant's cap—and his ability to attract foreign and domestic investment to Moscow. In this he significantly out-competed the potentially better-situated former capital, St. Petersburg, which during the reign of Anatoly Sobchak and his right-hand man Vladimir Putin experienced an embarrassing run of dissolution, disinvestment, and outright criminality. Despite his success as Moscow mayor, Luzhkov was also fabulously corrupt—his wife, Yelena Baturina, went into the construction business and just happened to emerge as the first female billionaire in Russia—and in the end not particularly good at solving some of Moscow's most pressing problems, like congestion. (Instead of investing in public transport, Luzhkov eliminated traffic lights and rammed through more roads, to little avail.) He was also a rabid Russian nationalist who had a nasty habit of declaring that Crimea was actually part of Russia. He particularly liked saying this while visiting Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea fleet shared territory with the Ukrainian fleet. It got to the point where the Ukrainian authorities declared Luzhkov persona non grata and refused him entry to the country.

These were the leading contenders for the presidency in early 1999. The calculus changed in the fall of that year when the relatively unknown Putin was appointed prime minister and the Yeltsin-friendly Channel One began a masterful defamation campaign against both Luzhkov and Primakov. Then the apartment bombings took place, serving as a pretext for another round of war with Chechnya. Putin was no longer a short, squeaky-voiced unknown but a wartime leader, and he was duly elected in (early) elections in March 2000.

The point is, even if Putin hadn’t come out on top, the other candidates were also nationalists who lamented Russia’s loss of superpower status. One of them, as head of the foreign intelligence service, would have been privy to Russian covert operations in such places as Transnistria, Abkhazia and Chechnya. The other was on record much earlier than Putin in lamenting the loss of Crimea. A third popular politician from the period was General Alexander Lebed, who’d been known in the military for punching subordinates. In 1995 he published a tract called “It’s Sad About the Empire.”

What about the so-called liberals? The so-called liberals had no popular support. Anatoly Chubais, one of the architects of the early '90s "reforms," was one of the most hated men in Russia (in 2005, a deranged former army officer would try to assassinate Chubais by setting off a roadside bomb and then unloading on his armored car from an automatic); Boris Nemtsov, briefly groomed by Yeltsin as his heir apparent, was more interested in maintaining a good tan in winter than vying for political office; and Grigory Yavlinsky, possibly the most principled of the major liberal politicians, was also the most passive, content with his steady 7 percent of the electorate.

Any viable candidate who emerged from the debacle of the 1990s, when Russian life expectancy plunged, its borders shrank to a size not seen since the early 18th century and it lost a war on its periphery to a scruffy, lightly armed group of freedom fighters—any viable politician would have had to reject the policies that led to these catastrophes in the strongest possible terms. All the viable candidates did so. The bet made by the Yeltsin inner circle was that Putin would be the least anti-liberal of the bunch—that is to say, they were betting on the existence of Nice Putin.

They turned out to be wrong. In his first few years, Putin looked like he could go either way. He was curt during his introduction to President Bill Clinton ("We're going to miss ol' Boris," Clinton supposedly remarked afterward to his chief Russia hand, Strobe Talbott) but cozied up to President George W. Bush, especially in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Nice Putin could not have acted any nicer than actual Putin on the day of the event, being the first leader to call the American president with his condolences and offer of support. He canceled military exercises that might have seemed unnecessarily aggressive to the bereaved Americans, and pressured his allies in Central Asia to open their airspace and real estate to U.S. military bases. The good times didn't last (especially when the Bush administration started pushing for a missile shield in Eastern Europe), but for a while you could imagine a Nice Putin, if you wanted to.

For many people, Putin went wrong when he ordered the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the oil giant Yukos, in fall 2003. But what would Nice Putin—some plausible alternative leader—have done? Last year, Thane Gustafson, of Georgetown University, published his magisterial Wheel of Fortune, a history of the post-Soviet oil business, which contains the most convincing and complete account yet of what exactly prompted Putin to act as he did against Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky had privatized not only Yukos (a giant oil conglomerate built up over decades by Soviet labor) but also important portions of the Duma. He had alienated many old Soviet oil men with his aggressive drilling practices. He had begun running what amounted to an independent foreign policy by negotiating directly with the Chinese for a new interstate pipeline.

Most important, from the state's perspective, Khodorkovsky had received his controlling stake of Yukos as a sort of trust; at a moment of tremendous weakness, the state had had to sell off its crown industrial jewels for a pittance. The insiders who bought them had become fabulously rich. From the state's perspective—and this would have been Nice Putin's perspective, too, had such a person existed—the insiders owed the government their loyalty.

Now, Nice Putin—a more nimble and far-seeing Russian leader of the time—would never have ordered the arrest of someone for political purposes. He would have tried to find a way to bring Khodorkovsky and his enormous oil company (at the time the biggest oil company in the second biggest oil producer in the world) into the fold. If Khodorkovsky refused, perhaps Nice Putin would have mounted a legal challenge to his ownership of Yukos, citing the transparently corrupt ways in which the "loans-for-shares" auctions were run in 1995. As president of Russia, acting on behalf of the Russian people, Nice Putin would have been within his rights to do this. He could easily have renationalized Yukos without actually jailing Khodorkovsky. That would have been the more politic thing to do. And it is likely that Nice Putin would have done it.

Nice Putin would in a similar spirit have carried out many of the same policies as actual Putin but in a gentler, wiser fashion. The regional governors who had been elected throughout the 1990s were for the most part corrupt thugs in league with local criminal gangs and/or major corporate concerns. Just like actual Putin, Nice Putin would have wanted them replaced. Perhaps, however, rather than simply canceling elections as Putin did in 2004, Nice Putin would have sent election observers to the regions to make certain that elections were free and fair. Nice Putin could have set up an election fund so that local civic leaders could compete for advertising and billboard space with local bosses, and he would have made sure that laws about equal television access were strictly complied with. He might even have gone ahead and eliminated some of the more odious candidates by passing (or enforcing?) laws restricting anyone with a criminal conviction from running for office. Nice Putin’s difficult and, for the election observers, dangerous reforms could have gone a long way toward ensuring the provinces more honest governors.

One could continue in this vein for a while. We can see that there'd have been serious differences between Nice Putin and actual Putin in the implementation of their various initiatives, but the underlying problems that they would be trying to address would, by and large, be the same.

***

And now to the real question at hand. What would Nice Putin have done about Ukraine?

This is a vexing question. A few months ago I was asked in a survey of Russia "experts" whether I thought the current crisis in Ukraine was primarily the result of NATO expansion or, rather, Putin's aggressive foreign policy. I was flummoxed. The answer was certainly "both," but this was not an answer: The question was which of them was more to blame. Would Putin have behaved this way if NATO were not expanding? Conversely, would someone who wasn't Putin (Nice Putin, say) have behaved this way if NATO was?

Before we get to Nice Putin, consider Russian foreign policy in its "near abroad" over the past 25 years. Probably the worst thing Putin has done in the past year is to encourage and arm the separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine. The rebel forces are made up of local miners, veterans and criminals, volunteer Cossacks and Caucasians, and Russian regulars. Where have we seen some of these people before? The answer is: Transnistria in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1992-93. At the time, we heard the same denials of involvement from the Russian higher-ups (not one of whom was named Putin), followed by the same obvious proof of their complicity. Some of the volunteer heroes were even the same: Igor Strelkov, leader of the initial invasion of eastern Ukraine in April 2014, got his first taste of combat in Transnistria in 1992. (Shamil Basaev, later the military hero of the Chechen rebellion, got his first taste of combat in Abkhazia that year; his later war, the Chechen one, was started by Boris Yeltsin.)

In 2008, when Dmitry Medvedev was president, Russia invaded and briefly occupied Georgia, which had been making noises about joining NATO. But it might be argued that Medvedev was being manipulated by Putin. So be it. The point is that for the past 25 years, under various leaders and under various circumstances, Russia has invaded or aided in the invasion of Georgia, Moldova, Chechnya (twice), and then Georgia again. And that’s just the wars that everyone knows about.

What about NATO? NATO expansion took place in several stages. The first country to join NATO was East Germany, when it reunited with West Germany in 1990. In negotiations leading up to the historic event, the Soviets had been holding out for a neutral Germany, then agreed to a NATO-allied Germany if NATO promised not to expand any further east. But the promise was verbal, and in any case NATO did not honor it. In 1999, just as Putin was coming to power, three former Warsaw Pact countries (not coincidentally, the most restless among them)— Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic—joined NATO. In 2004, they were joined by Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, traditional Russian ally Slavic Bulgaria (in defense of which, against the Turks, Vronsky goes to fight at the end of Anna Karenina) and Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which had once been part of the Russian Empire. In 2009, these were joined by Croatia and Albania (!). NATO also suggested that former Soviet republics Georgia and Ukraine could be eligible, though it did not produce any kind of timetable for that eligibility.

Does Russia have any right to tell its neighbors how to run their foreign policy? Only if that foreign policy can be considered a threat to Russia. Can Russia be said to have been threatened by the EU association agreement with Ukraine whose sudden rejection by Viktor Yanukovych (under pressure from Russia) triggered the protests at Maidan in fall 2013? It's hard to make the argument that it was a threat to Russia. But is Ukrainian membership in NATO a potential threat to Russia? It's hard to make the argument that it isn't.

This is, of course, the double bind of NATO enlargement. Do places that have been invaded by Russia in the not so distant past have reason to fear that they might be invaded again? Obviously. Do they further have reason to seek alliances with stronger partners? Maybe. Do these alliances make the country that they seek to constrain—that is, Russia—nervous? Also, unfortunately, yes.

I keep thinking of two things. One was a Duma session that I happened to attend in September 1995, while NATO was bombing Bosnian Serb targets not far from Sarajevo. Back in the United States, I had watched the lengthy, painful debate over whether to intervene militarily to help the Bosnians; the bombing was the final fruit of that debate, and it got the Serbs off the hills from which they'd terrorized the Sarajevans. Never had it occurred to me that Russia may have some feelings on the matter. It hadn't apparently occurred to U.S. policymakers either. As far as I could tell, no one had come to visit Moscow to try and get the Russians "on board." The Duma was electric with anger. The Communists, the Agrarians, the Zhirinovskyites all took turns expressing their indignation at American aggression in what was, after all, a former Communist country peopled partly by Slavic co-ethnics on whose behalf Russia had once entered World War I.

The Duma back then was something of a circus, but it was, more or less, a real circus, if that makes sense, the product of more or less genuine elections. I was just a college student and not particularly well-informed about the nuances of foreign politics, but it was clear to me that we'd botched things—that American actions in Yugoslavia, however well-intentioned (and I, at the time, supported them), were going to cause a nationalist reaction in Russia. And they did. In the Duma elections held a couple of months after the bombing, the remaining liberal parties were trounced. For the rest of the decade, the Duma was controlled by a red-brown coalition of Stalinists and quasi-fascists.

The other thing I keep thinking about is Nicholas II, Russia's last tsar. Though he has since been sainted by the Russian Orthodox church, Nicholas was no saint. He tolerated terrible cruelty in his dominions, authorized a stupid, losing war against Japan, refused to grant the people a constitution and enjoyed reading aloud from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nonetheless, he is frequently described by historians as a gentle, polite, kind-hearted family man who doted on his wife and children and enjoyed the outdoors. He was related by blood and manners to half the royal families in Europe.

But when this charming Nicholas, by then already imprisoned with his family in Yekaterinburg, awaiting their brutal execution, read about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, whereby the Bolsheviks surrendered Belarus, Ukraine, the Crimea, the modern-day Baltic States and part of Georgia to the Germans, he said he would rather cut off his hand than sign such a treaty. And yet Russia in 1991 lost more than the Bolsheviks had given up in 1918.

We keep hearing that with the invasion of Crimea, Russia has upset the stable post-Cold War order. But I find myself intrigued by the German political scientist Ulrich Kuhn's argument that, far from being an aggressive power over the past 20 years, Russia has tried to defend the status quo. As the timeline of NATO expansion above might indicate, if anyone has been "re-drawing the map of Europe," it is not, or at least primarily, the Russians.

What would Nice Putin, faced with an inexorably expanding EU and NATO, have done? Might he have used the confusion and disarray following the overthrow of Yanukovych to seize the strategically vital (for Russia) port of Sevastopol and its accompanying peninsula, the Crimea? Maybe. Would he have lied about doing it, while he did it? Being ashamed of himself, probably yes. Would he then have aided and even fomented a nasty separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine, to try to destabilize Ukraine even further? I don't know. Nice Putin would try to avoid bloodshed. But if the alternative was a Ukraine that joined NATO, we might have found ourselves surprised at how far Nice Putin would have been willing to go.

A decade and a half ago, Russia was inevitably going to end up with someone very much like Putin, if not Putin himself. By 2012, after a decade of strong economic growth and impressive iPhone penetration, Russia might have been ready for someone different. Unfortunately, Putin was not ready, and appointed himself to another term. But whoever comes after Putin is going to be dealing with the same geopolitical situation, the same troubled historical legacy, the same restive neighbors, the same obsolete physical plant.

A lot of that is Putin’s fault! But we should not compound the sin by confusing a country’s long-held, stated interests with the unattractive current vehicle for those interests. Comparing Putin to Hitler does not help; dismissing Russia as a “regional power” does not help. (Sure, it’s a regional power, but that region happens to be Europe) The sooner we start understanding the nature of what a regime led by Nice Putin would look like, the sooner we can start formulating a reasonable, far-seeing and humbler Russia policy, instead of the sleepwalking, chaotic—and complacent—one that’s been ours for the past 15 years.