Is Russia Our Enemy?These days, it's not so simple.

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Americans (and Europeans, too) were spoiled in the 1990s by the dramatic accommodations and reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, who, as Soviet communism unraveled, embraced the West with heroic urgency—destroying the Soviet Union's empire, disarming its military, shutting down censors, opening free markets.

For many reasons, the great experiments didn't work out. Several citizens, especially in Moscow and a few other cities, did very well by the reforms. But most fared poorly. And compared with the other nations of the Western world that Gorbachev and Yeltsin were trying to join, Russia as a nation was weak and impoverished. And the reforms highlighted, and aggravated, this fact.

Yeltsin did not extend privatization of industry as widely as many Westerners have thought. The gas and oil industries, in particular, remained under state control. When world oil prices soared, so did the fortunes of the Russian state. And with the Kremlin run by someone like Putin, a former KGB agent and an unapologetic (and, by the way, very popular) nationalist, it was no big surprise when he started flexing Russia's muscles.

Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow center, put it well in an insightful article in Foreign Affairs, published a year ago. "Until recently," he wrote, "Russia saw itself as Pluto in the Western solar system, very far from the center but still fundamentally a part of it. Now it has left that orbit entirely. Russia's leaders have given up on becoming part of the West and have started creating their own Moscow-centered system."

This does not mean the world is becoming divided into Moscow Central and Washington Central. Neither capital is the center of as much as its political leaders would like. Nor does either have the resources to rev up its military machine to the levels of the Cold War. Nor can either occupy the vast garrisons in Europe where they once faced off across the East-West border, which, among other things, no longer exists.

And though Russia may have left the Western orbit, it is not necessarily opposed or hostile to its tracings. American and Russian interests will sometimes coincide, sometimes converge, sometimes conflict (but uneventfully), and sometimes collide. The same can be said of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, French, and other countries' interests.

In other words, the world has returned to its "normal" condition, to which the era of the Cold War was always an anomaly. (The era only seemed normal because its term, roughly 1947-91, extended through the entirety of most of our lives.)

This should not be taken as a reassuring statement. "Normal" conditions, through the centuries, have been rife with warfare and tension. The current era is particularly hazardous, as there is no structure, no widely recognized balance of power, that organizes international politics—nothing like the Congress of Vienna in the 19^th century or the Soviet-American stand-off in the mid-to-late 20^th century. (I don't mean to romanticize the Cold War or any other system of global hegemony; I'm just noting that they kept a certain sort of order.)

One thing this condition implies—in fact, demands—is a greater premium on creative diplomacy, on balancing interests and building coalitions. It is daft and dangerous for Washington and Moscow to start regarding one another as an enemy.

We don't have to overlook the outrages that Putin routinely commits these days. But it's naive to expect him to kowtow to moral lectures from Americans, who can hardly claim purity in this administration. We have too many interests in common to foment further hostility. We have too few resources or automatic allies to turn mutual hostility into a national benefit. The Russians don't threaten our vital interests. There's not much we can do to threaten theirs. As long as Bush and Putin recognize these facts as the starting points, Russian-American relations won't spiral too far out of hand.

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Fred Kaplan, Slate's "War Stories" columnist, was the Boston Globe's Moscow bureau chief from 1992-95.

Photograph of Bush and Putin by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images. Photograph of Putin on Slate's home page by Chesnot/SIPA.

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