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FEVER SINCE George W. Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and "was able to get a sense of his soul," the story of their meeting in Slovenia in 2001 has been invoked as a lesson about the need for innocent Americans to awaken to the innate devilry of Russia's leader. In 2008, Democratic presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton declared that she could have told Bush that Putin didn't have a soul because he "was a KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul." Three years later, according to then Vice President Joe Biden, he stood inches from Putin's face in Moscow and told him: "I'm looking into your eyes, and I don't think you have a soul." To people as different as the politician John McCain and the Penn professor Benjamin Nathans, all one needs to know about Putin is contained in three letters: K-G-B. According to a sensational video by the actor Morgan Freeman and the director Rob Reiner, Putin, a "true KGB spy," was so "angry at the collapse of his communist motherland" in 1991 that he has plotted relentlessly since then to take revenge on America and restore the Soviet empire. The overwhelming consensus about American-Russian tensions has been tersely summarized by the Stanford political scientist Kathryn Stoner: the problem is "a Putin problem."
Blaming the dangerous deterioration of Russian-American relations on the soulless character of Vladimir Putin is simplistic, misleading, and ahistorical. It obscures rather than reveals the main sources of American-Russian conflict. Characterizations of Putin as once and forever a KGB agent with a paranoid Cold War mentality and inveterate hostility to the West disregard dramatic changes in his policies as well as the ups and downs in American-Russian relations since he first became Russia's president in 2000. Depictions of Putin that show him locked into a confrontational course by his desperate need for foreign enemies to overcome domestic political challenges ignore his repeated overtures to US leaders for better relations and his persistently high approval ratings in Russia. Portraits of Putin as a fanatical Eurasian revanchist are belied by the fact that his perceptions of Russian national interests are in the main stream of Russian nationalism. It is true that Putin has not been saintly in his treatment of...