In short, Americans and Europeans projected their own overlapping if still distinct understandings and hopes onto Russia, persuading themselves that there was something universal and everything benign about so doing. Even when they did things that irritated the Russians, like expanding NATO into the territory of the former Soviet Union, most persuaded themselves that the Russians would in time come to understand the good reasons for such policies. It was as though Russia were a train on a track that could only go forward or backward. It seems rarely to have occurred to Western politicians and intellectuals that the losers of the Cold War would be doing some projecting of their own, based on their own history and experience, their own frustrations and hopes. When Russia eventually confounded rather than conformed to Western expectations, it began to dawn on some that Russia was not in transit to any Western-designated destination, but was instead headed somewhere else in a vehicle of its own choosing.