NATO enlargement, for instance, loomed very large among those grievances. This issue goes back to the reunification of Germany which took NATO eastward to the German-Polish border. This was when Russia was given the assurances that NATO would not be moved further. In his Munich speech, Putin lamented that those pledges fell into oblivion. “And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” he said. “Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.…Where are these guarantees?”

At the time, the promise that NATO would not be expanded immediately caused indignation and fear in Central Europe and in the Baltics. The presidents of those countries begged the United States to protect them by granting them NATO membership -- no wonder, given their horrible and still fresh memories of the Soviet occupation and bloody repressions.

Meanwhile, the Russian post-Communist officials and pro-Western policy-makers implored the U.S. administration not to enlarge NATO: many in Russia regarded NATO as an enemy -- not surprising after the decades of the Cold War.

The U.S. was facing a dilemma whose fears and frustrations were more important. Both fears had to do with the past and therefore were somewhat irrational. After the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union there was no rational reason for Russia to be afraid of NATO, since its purpose was to oppose the USSR, the militant ideological adversary that was no more. Likewise, there was no reason for the Central and Eastern European countries to be afraid of Russia -- dramatically weakened, its economy in a state of collapse, its armed forces demoralized and suffering from acute shortage of funds. Both NATO and Russia made arguments that the fears were unsubstantiated and based on the perceptions that were wrong. But these reassurances were hardly persuasive. As in any human interaction from personal relations to world affairs, perceptions are often all that matters.

Strobe Talbott, the architect of the U.S. Russia policy during this period of NATO expansion recalls in his book “The Russia Hand” the words of the Estonian president Lennart Meri who called Russia a “malignancy in recession” and insisted that it would relapse into authoritarianism at home and expansionism abroad.

The view of Russia as a “malignancy” implied that Russia itself was evil, not the brutal Communist regime that exterminated its own subjects even more zealously than those of the countries it occupied. This view implied that Russia’s concerns were illegitimate. Talbott writes that he thought that Meri’s pessimistic view of Russia ”could be self-fulfilling” and that it would be wrong if NATO adopted “an anti-Russian rationale” for taking in new members because it would “tip the balance of forces in Russian politics in the direction that we -- along with Meri, Walesa and Havel, not to mention many Russians…most feared”.

The United States should be given credit for showing some sensitivity. Several steps were taken to sweeten the pill. The Partnership for Peace was conceived as a form of cooperation between NATO and former Warsaw Pact; the Clinton administration tried to adjust the timing of the enlargement so as to do less harm to President Yeltsin’s stature vis-a-vis his fierce Communist opposition which condemned Yeltsin as a traitor who danced to a Western tune. There was plenty of soothing, wooing and persuading on a high personal level.

But the Partnership for Peace failed to evolve as a meaningful arrangement. The fact of the matter was that NATO was progressively enlarged, Russia’s frustrations notwithstanding.

In late 1995 Talbott’s concerns proved justified. The balance of forces in Russian politics tipped: Communists crushed the reformists in the Russian legislature. The policy of cooperation with the West was dramatically undermined. NATO enlargement may not be the sole factor in this shift, but it was a very significant one.

Russian frustrations were further aggravated -- and ignored again -- in 1999 when NATO was bombing Yugoslavia. The United States and NATO could afford to ignore Russia’s protests because Russia was weak. But the Russian frustrations accumulated. So it is only natural that when Russia felt stronger due to high energy prices, failed U.S. foreign policy and a lack of coherence in the EU, it has sought to assert itself and make up for the years of the post-Cold War humiliation. It is this sentiment that dominated Putin’s Munich speech.

Meri proved largely right, especially with regard to Russian domestic authoritarianism. As for the expansionism, at least for now, Russia does not show imperialistic ambitions. It has aggressively furthered its economic interests, but it does not seek political dominance. In fact, its heavy-handed economic pressure has worked to push farther away from Russia several of the former Soviet states.

But though Meri’s forecast proved correct, this does not mean that his assessment of Russia as a chronic and hopeless malignancy was right. Not least because such assessment implies that we are at a dead end: there can be no good Russia policy, if Russia is forever doomed and condemned.

There is always a better policy, but it is very rare for policy-makers to have enough time and focus.

Of course, at the time when NATO enlargement was launched the United States had more important issues on its agenda than Russia’s sensitivities and frustrations. “In Washington we were less focused on trying to anticipate what the attitude of Russia would be to enlargement than on figuring out what American policy should be”, Talbott writes.

Russia was not top priority back then, and the relations between Russia and the West have grown increasingly cooler and continue to deteriorate. Russia is even less a priority today. The U.S. is preoccupied with Iraq, Iran, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and North Korea. Europe’s ability to put together cohesive policies is strongly limited. In Russia the political campaign related to the forthcoming transfer of authority in 2008 is dominated by anti-Western rhetoric.

The Cold War is over and will not come back. The world has changed too much over the last two decades. But there are elements in today’s relations between Russian and the West that are reminiscent of the Cold War. One of them is the desperate lack of adequate communication. Unless this communication failure is overcome, the relations will be locked in a vicious circle of ad hoc moves and responses, tipping the balance of forces in Russian politics further in the authoritarian and anti-Western direction.