Putin's Russia Acts Like a Great Power Again

U.S. officials say the missile defense project is a response to a future Iranian nuclear missile threat to the United States and its allies and is not a shield against Russia. But the Russians see it differently. Last week, they harshly denounced a newly signed U.S. accord with Poland that will have the U.S. deploy a battery of Patriot air-defense missiles.

To top that off, Russian authorities are impatient with what they regard as years of moralistic American hectoring about creeping Russian authoritarianism.

U.S. aid and training for the Georgian Army, coupled with the anti-Russian taunts of what Moscow regards as an American client, intensified the Kremlin's disaffection. Moscow also objected to U.S. backing this year for an independent Kosovo and an effort to put Georgia and Ukraine on track for future NATO membership.

It was not just Putin who accumulated these grudges. "There is a public consensus that Russia was humiliated," says Simes. "They felt they had very little to lose."

In Washington, the impressively high-level expertise on Russia seemed to do little to forestall a crisis.

Bush has consistently seemed far more comfortable with promoting the principles of democracy, freedom, and free markets than he has with the less lofty business of calibrating foreign policy to respond to Russia's predictable interests. "The preaching and perceptions belie a naiveté, even a degree of delusion" about the building Russian-Georgian tensions, Allison argues.

The problem extends to the top echelons of the administration, according to Simes, who says that Rice neglected the early, internal warnings from senior American diplomats that any Georgian move into South Ossetia—such as what happened two weeks ago—would trigger a major Russian response.

Several factors are making it more difficult to craft an effective U.S. response. Talking with Moscow has grown more complicated because there is a new president, Dmitry Medvedev, but Putin, the former president and current prime minister, is still calling the shots.

The old pattern of disagreements between administration hard-liners and moderates has also reappeared, with get-tough advocates from Vice President Cheney's office said to be favoring moves to bolster Georgia's defenses.

Though the U.S. hard-liners may place stock in efforts to isolate Russia, the Europeans are mostly skeptical. They tend to see Saakashvili as impetuous and partially to blame for the current crisis, and they see no good alternative to continuing to engage even a surly Russia. Despite Russia's aggressiveness, the European sense is that their nations must share a continent with Russia and will continue to depend on it for energy.

Moreover, Russia could respond to pressure by making trouble on a variety of fronts for the Bush administration and its successor. Washington will need Moscow to prod and cajole Tehran if the collective effort to restrain Iran's nuclear drive is to succeed. The same need holds, to some degree, in regard to attempts to denuclearize North Korea. Russia is an important link in the chain of international cooperation against terrorism and organized crime, and it has the capacity to buck up foes of the United States from Serbia to Syria to Venezuela. A sale of sophisticated Russian weaponry to Hugo Chavez's Venezuela or to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran would create significant security issues for the next administration.

Says Allison, "The relationship is going to be dragged back into the reality zone." An angry Russia, it seems, has many more unpleasant cards to play, if it chooses to serve as a spoiler.