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... Hungary, and Romania, and Slovakia, and Lithuania have done.
Just as importantly, NATO has consistently sought to enlist Russia as a partner in building a peaceful and prosperous Europe. Russia has had a seat at nearly every NATO summit since 2002. So to claim that this alliance is somehow directed against Russia is simply to ignore recent history. In fact, our assumption has always been – and it still is – that Russia’s legitimate need for security is best served not by having weak, fractious, and poor states on its borders – but rather peaceful, prosperous, and democratic ones.
It is simply not valid, either, to blame Russia’s behavior on the United States – either for being too tough with Russia, or not tough enough, too unaccommodating to Russia’s interests or too naïve about its leaders.
Since the end of the Cold War – spanning three administrations, both Democratic and Republican – the United States has sought to encourage the emergence of a strong, prosperous, and responsible Russia. We have treated Russia not as a vanquished enemy, but as an emerging partner. We have supported – politically and financially – Russia’s transition to a modern, market-based economy and a free, peaceful society. And we have respected Russia as a great power, with which to work to solve common problems.
When our interests have diverged, the United States has consulted Russia’s leaders. We’ve searched for common ground. And we have sought, as best we could, to take Russia’s interests and ideas into account. This is how we have approached contentious issues – from Iran, to Kosovo, to missile defense. And I have traveled repeatedly to Russia, the last times – two times with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to try to foster cooperation.
Increasingly, Russia’s leaders have simply not reciprocated. And their recent actions are leading some to ask whether we are now engaged in a new Cold War. No, we are not. But it does beg the question: Where did this Russia come from?  How did the Russia of the 1990s become the Russia of today?
After all, the 1990s were, in many ways, a period of real hope and promise for Russia. The totalitarian state was dismantled. The scope of liberty for most Russians expanded significantly – in what they could read, in what they could say, in what they could buy and sell, and what associations they could form. New leaders emerged who sought to steer Russia toward political and economic reform at home, toward integration into the global economy, and toward a responsible international role.
All of this is true. But many Russians remember things differently about the 1990s. They remember that decade as a time of license and lawlessness, economic uncertainty and social chaos. A time when criminals and gangsters and robber barons plundered the Russian state and preyed on the weakest in Russian society. A time when many Russians – not just elites and former apparatchiks, but ordinary men and women – experienced a sense of dishonor and dislocation that we in the West did not fully appreciate.
I remember that Russia, because I saw it firsthand. I remember old women selling their life’s belongings along the old Arbat – plates and broken teacups, anything to get by.
I remember that Russian soldiers returned home from Eastern Europe and lived in tents, because the Russian state was just too weak and too poor to house them properly.
I remember talking to my Russian friends – tolerant, open, progressive people – who felt an acute sense of shame during that decade. Not at the loss of the Soviet Union, but at the feeling of not recognizing their own country anymore: the Bolshoi theater falling apart, pensioners unable to pay their bills, the Russian Olympic team in 1992 parading into the games under a flag that no one had ever seen, and receiving gold medals to an anthem that no one had ever heard. There was a humiliating sense that nothing Russian was good enough anymore.
This does not excuse Russia’s behavior, but it helps to set a context for it. It helps to explain why many ordinary Russians felt relieved and proud when new leaders emerged at the end of the last decade, who sought to reconstitute the Russian state and reassert its power abroad. An imperfect authority was seen as better than no authority at all.
What has become clear is that the legitimate goal of rebuilding the Russian state has taken a dark turn – with the rollback of personal freedoms, the arbitrary enforcement of the law, the pervasive corruption at various levels of Russian society, and the paranoid, aggressive impulse, which has manifested itself before in Russian history, to view the emergence of free and independent democratic neighbors – most recently, during the so-called “color revolutions” in Georgia, and Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan – not as a source of security, but as a source of threat to Russia’s interests.
Whatever its course, though, Russia today is not the Soviet Union – not in the size of its territory, the reach of its power, the scope of its aims, or the nature of the regime. Russia’s leaders today have no pretensions to ideological universality, no alternative vision to democratic capitalism, and no ability to construct a parallel system of client states and rival institutions. The bases of Soviet power are gone.
And despite their leaders’ authoritarianism, Russians today enjoy more prosperity, more opportunity, and in some sense, more liberty...