What you write in your post is true. The part I don't understand is one of Soetero's first deals when he was in office was to deny eastern bloc nations a missile defense then all this fanatical shallow intrigue as he's going out the door.I respect Putin as a clever tactician. I have yet to see anything worth respecting in Soeter0. Can't speak for others but what I like about Putin is he's a leader whereas Soter0 is just a clod.
Like some people here on FreeRepublic that support the Putin worldview, Obama, who shared their view, accepted that Putin could be appeased and was someone you could have a good transactional relationship with (remember the comment in 2012 when he said on a hot mike after the election I'll have more room for a deal). To Obama and the pro-Putin people, the former KGB Colonel was no different than any other world leader. In 2013, all of the US tanks were out of Germany. The result of Obama's naiveté is a re-assertive Putin who used the Obama/Clinton reset to pursue his own goals of reestablishing dominance over what the haughty Russians call the "near abroad." The lesson here is that Putin ruthlessly pursues his goals without concern for anything else. He's not interested in being a good neighbor, a partner for peace, or a paladin Jesus Christ, or of the people world. He's interested in protecting the small oligarchy that runs Russia. He's a fraud and a thug.
Luckily for real conservatives, not the ones who show up here and praise Putin and applaud his empire-building as some type of Christian project, there is the model of the highly successful and real conservative president Ronald Reagan. He correctly showed that when dealing with the Soviets (and frankly much of Putin's ethos is still in him from that time from his formative years) you must watch them closely and judge them by their actions. You can negotiate, but verify anything they say because you cannot blindly trust them.