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cedarford:

That changed when the Congress changed hands and the bear-baiting started.

This is the exact opposite of what we did with defeated Germany and Japan after WWII – where we wanted their strength and dignity restored and avoided a pattern of post-war humiliations –
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The fallacy in this argument is that the US did not destroy and conquer Russia and therefore did not have complete military and political control of that nation, to enable the US to affect that type of reconstruction.

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Which has these central points: (1)But is not Russian anger understandable? For years the West has rubbed Russia’s nose in her Cold War defeat and treated her like Weimar Germany. (2) Rampant Western hypocrisy on self-determination (3) Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them.
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1) No it is not… post cold war the US attempted to boost the Russians by enabling democracy, engaging them in multilateral institutions, assisting their transformation to free market capitalism. Your implication that the “neocons” (we know your connotation) spiked all that is false.

What changed in the mid 90′s is that Vladimir Putin and his KGB clique began to assume the reigns of power in Russia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin#Early_political_career