How U.S. presidents missed the Russia threat -- until it was much, much too late

For nearly two decades, in fact, the Russian government and Russian companies spent money systematically to create corrupt business relationships as well as to undermine democracies in both Eastern and Western Europe. During that period, no U.S. president or secretary of state ever took any threat from Russia seriously, all of them either overestimating the Kremlin’s goodwill or underestimating its capacity to do damage. Bush “looked into Putin’s eyes” in 2001 and got “a sense of his soul.” Obama dismissed Putin back in 2013 as behaving “like a bored kid in the back of the classroom.”

Neither one of them ever understood the corrosive effect of Russian money, whether on New York real estate or Western democracy. Neither understood the subtle ways in which a large, kleptocratic, semi-criminal state on Europe’s borders could threaten Western political stability. Neither understood that the U.S. political system, like that of France, Germany and Ukraine, had become so vulnerable, or that U.S. political operatives may have turned to Russian hackers for help. By 2016, it was already too late to stop Russia, because most of the damage had already been done.