For forty years after World War II, the United States viewed Russia—as the central part of the Soviet Union—as the world’s leading threat both to U.S. interests and to world peace. In an October 1999 speech at Harvard University, deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott noted that “when Russia was the core of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, it posed a threat to us because of its size; its military might; its habit of intimidating and suppressing others; its doctrinal and geopolitical drive to extend its power on a global scale; . . . its hostility to American interests and values. That was the Russia whose strength we confronted and contained.”

The collapse of the Soviet Communist dictatorship profoundly changed the nature of Russia’s influence on the...