Putin became Russian acting president in 1999, but by 2007, he was painting NATO not as a community of shared security, but as a vehicle to threaten Russia. In that year, Putin delivered a scorching speech in Munich that excoriated the U.S. and its allies. He effectively delinked Russia from the Western zone of shared security, condemning NATO (though not by name) as a “vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries.” In the same speech, however, he emphasized that Russia wanted to remain a part of the Western economic system, and that it would join the World Trade Organization and welcome further Western investment.

Not long after Putin’s speech, his government began its first attempts to re-divide Europe. When NATO proclaimed support for Ukraine and Georgia’s eventual membership at a summit in April 2008, Moscow insisted on legal guarantees that NATO would not enlarge any further. The former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—whose independence the United States had recognized throughout the Cold War—had already joined NATO in 2004. In June 2008, the Kremlin proposed talks on a draft treaty that would allow Russia to veto any new members of the alliance. The U.S. and its allies ignored the proposal, which would have severely limited other countries’ sovereignty in direct contravention of the Charters of the 1990s. Two months later, Russia invaded Georgia and to this day occupies twenty percent of that country’s territory.

Russia wanted to benefit from the economic integration of the post-Cold War world while rejecting the security order that made economic integration possible. The proper American and allied response to Russia’s aggression should have been to impose costs. But no significant penalties were imposed for the use of force against Georgia’s territorial integrity. The lesson to the Kremlin was that it could assert domination over what it called its “sphere of privileged interests” without paying a price.