Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which put Russia’s socialist, expansionist regime at loggerheads with much of the world for most of the 20th century, the West, and especially the United States, has struggled with a confounding question: What to do about Russia? In the 1970s, the Nixon administration found an answer: détente, a policy predicated not on threats, but on dialogue. Russia is too big, too resource-rich, too vital (as an energy supplier to Europe), and too technologically advanced to disregard (or “isolate” as Obama has said he hopes to do). Its nuclear arsenal alone—the only such arsenal capable of destroying the West—imposes an imperative: dialogue, as distasteful as that may be to many. In short, if Russia and the United States are quarreling, global peace is under threat.

Corker’s bill purports to offer a “strategic framework for United States security assistance and cooperation in Europe and Eurasia,” but in fact directs the president to take a number of measures that would imperil both objectives. According to the legislation, the United States and NATO would, in violation of the 1997 Founding Act (concluded between the alliance and Russia), permanently station troops in the alliance member states of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and “accelerate” (in an unspecified way) “European and NATO missile defense efforts.” (There is much to specify here, since in 2009 the Obama administration, facing strong criticism from Russia and public opposition in the Czech Republic and Poland, the proposed host countries, scaled back plans for missile-defense systems in Eastern Europe.) Unprecedented “major non-NATO ally status” is to be accorded to Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. Military aid is promised to Ukraine, and cryptic verbiage about providing “defense articles or defense services” leaves open the possibility of doing the same for the other two former Soviet republics.

There are many other troubling provisions, but significantly, the bill instructs the president to block Russian assets and dramatically broaden sanctions against Russia if the Kremlin does not withdraw its military from Crimea and the Ukrainian border, and cease destabilizing the Ukrainian government’s control over its eastern regions. It also directs the U.S. secretary of state to “increase efforts [to] … strengthen democratic institutions and political and civil society organizations in the Russian Federation”—which sounds an awful lot like helping NGOs in Moscow promote regime change. (If Putin harbored any doubts that such NGOs were in the pay of the United States and working to subvert him, the bill neatly resolves them.) The act’s chief clauses would come into force if Putin doesn’t reverse course on Ukraine within seven to 30 days from its enactment.

How would the Russian president react to such an ultimatum? The former FSB chief, whose 14-year tenure in the country’s highest offices has bristled with televised displays of manliness and derring-do, would never submit to it. Sanctions have so far done nothing but consolidate domestic support for him and his Ukraine policy. Truly damaging economic restrictions would foment more anti-Western (and, specifically, anti-American) hostility and strengthen Russians’ conviction—generated by the virulent propaganda streaming forth endlessly over Kremlin-controlled airwaves—that the West is ganging up on Russia and bent on destroying it. Indeed, this perception is already widespread, and has taken root among many Russians who were previously indifferent to politics or hostile to Putin, whose popularity now stands at 87 percent.