MOSCOW — The diatribe against the Obama administration on prime-time television by a Russian Foreign Ministry official was hardly unusual in the long history of rocky relations between the United States and Russia.
The Obama administration was “bad for everyone,” Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said on the Dec. 25 broadcast, barreling on almost uninterrupted by the talk show host. “They demonstrated the belief that the strongest has the right to create evil.”
From Washington’s perspective, of course, it is the Kremlin that generally personifies evil, a point President Obama made Thursday in punishing Russia for cyberattacks by directing sanctions against Moscow and expelling 35 Russian diplomats.
“The United States and friends and allies around the world must work together to oppose Russia’s efforts to undermine established international norms of behavior,” Obama said in a statement announcing the measures.
The two statements appeared to be business as usual — each side representing enemy No. 1 for the other, as they have since World War II ended and the Cold War began.
By Friday that mood had been abruptly cast aside, however. President Vladimir Putin announced Russia would do nothing in response to the new US measures, awaiting the next administration, prompting President-elect Donald Trump to call him “very smart” on Twitter.
US-Russian relations are passing through one of their most confusing moments in modern history amid the transition from one presidential administration to the next, with the sitting president calling Russia a national security threat and the incoming one praising Putin.
With Trump making admiring remarks about Putin — without the support of Congress — many American voters, accustomed for generations to be suspicious about Russia are understandably confused and uneasy. Russia was an enemy on Friday morning, and a friend by the afternoon.
“We are in a whiplash moment right now, and I think it is unprecedented in several respects,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of Eurasia Group, a political risk assessment firm in Washington, and a former State Department official from the Clinton administration. “The most important one is that the baton is about to be passed from an administration with a very hard line on Russia to one that is very much more sympathetic.”
But no clear agreements or even offers are on the table yet, bringing uncertainty. “Russia’s relations with the US are currently up in the air — both sides have no clear strategy about how to move them forward,” said Alexander Morozov, an independent Russian political analyst.
Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and even for years afterward, matters were more black and white. A young US diplomat stationed in Moscow named George F. Kennan established the parameters of the relationship for decades with a famous 1947 policy paper. The Soviet Union was bent on expansion, he wrote, so the main element of any US policy had to be containment.
Thus began a long roller coaster ride for the two countries, full of periodic upswings as friends when détente was in vogue, inevitably followed by precipitous plummets as foes that left the world shuddering about the prospects of a nuclear Armageddon.
Tensions eased periodically, but it never seemed to last.
President Ronald Reagan, an implacable anti-Communist, surprised the world by reaching out to the man who turned out to be the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to begin negotiations for far-reaching arms control agreements between the two sides.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Russian Federation that emerged entered into an extended period of decline and, inevitably, friendship with the United States as a kind of junior partner.
That “junior” aspect rankled, however, particular after Obama went from seeking to reset relations to dismissing Russia as a “regional power.”
The latest crisis began in 2014, with a revolution in Ukraine that Putin labeled a US plot — he, as many Soviet leaders did, sees the hidden hand of Washington everywhere. Putin annexed Crimea and armed rebels in eastern Ukraine, prompting Western economic sanctions, which Trump disparaged.
The last confrontation under the Obama administration between Moscow and Washington came to a head in the fall after US intelligence agencies concluded that hacking by their Russian counterparts had breached national security, cracking open the computers of the Democratic National Committee to reveal e-mails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Trump initially encouraged the Kremlin to hack even more, breaking with all precedents, not least the Republican tradition of painting Russia as the evil empire, as Reagan called it.
Obama waited to react until last week, and it looked as if he might leave his successor a diplomatic tempest, until Putin, long the master of the unexpected stroke, defused it.
Trump suddenly gained room to maneuver.
“Trump’s spirit is already here, and already changing Russia’s policies,” said Igor M. Bunin, director of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow research institute. “This will be a great plus for future relations.”
There are still potential pitfalls, however, not least that Congress does not share an affectionate view of Putin.
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, plans to open hearings Thursday on Russia’s efforts to manipulate the election. Much of the GOP establishment in Congress endorsed the new sanctions imposed against Russia, putting them at odds with Trump.
Putin has made no secret of the fact that he would like to re-establish the consensus reached with the United States at the 1945 Yalta conference that carved the globe into spheres of influence.
Russia no longer has the might needed to assert its right to be a superpower, analysts say, but if nothing else, cyberattacks have underscored that you do not need nuclear weapons or a strong economy to assert global influence.
Some Russian analysts wonder what Putin can offer Trump. A former KGB agent, he tends to view the world order as a series of special operations, coming from a different arena than Trump’s world of business deals. “I don’t think that Putin has a plan,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former media adviser to Putin. “I think that he is stunned by the number of bonus points that he has gotten.”