Vladimir Putin, shown above glaring like Terminator 2 from the pages of Business Week magazine, travels to Bucharest, Romania this week to visit the biggest NATO summit ever held in the home of its newest member.

Writing in the Daily Star newspaper Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the author of the recent book Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed, says that the West should guard itself against this bear in sheep’s clothing. He bluntly declares that Putin (but not Russia itself) is an “enemy of the West” who has placed Russia on course for a direct confrontation with NATO.

In May 2007 for instance, Aslund says, Putin equated the United States with Nazi Germany, declaring that it shows “the same contempt for human life and the same aspiration to establish an exclusive dictate over the world.” A few months earlier, Putin said that expansion of NATO to include Romania was “a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”

Aslund concludes: “Serious politicians do not speak like that. These are the rants of Putin’s few remaining friends - Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko. At home, awareness is rising that Putin is damaging Russia’s interests by insulting and intimidating everybody. He is isolating his country among the world’s pariahs. Worse yet, he has achieved little.”

It’s not the first time Putin has shown his true colors. Asked at a news conference on February 14th about rumors he had embezzled billions from the Russian treasury and was secretly Europe’s richest man, he refused to answer and replied instead that journalists had “just picked [the story] out of their nose and smeared it on their little sheets.” When the Kremlin published an official transcript of the news conference, it simply deleted Putin’s crude remark, as if it had never happened.

These actions are neo-Soviet in character, and not only (or even mostly) because they display so much contempt for the West and its values. More telling is that they evince the same sort of hypocrisy and detachment from reality that we saw from the USSR, the very traits that caused that regime to topple and fall.

Putin condemns the Bush administration as Nazis, but he seems to forget that Bush has been his greatest friend in the West since the time of their first meeting, when Bush “looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his soul” and declared him trustworthy. Putin is, quite literally, biting the hand that fed him. Now, Russia faces a Republican successor, John McCain, who has called for ejecting Russia from the G-8 in favor of India and Brazil.

And even worse, Putin doesn’t seem to care that, while complaining about provocation, he himself provokes. What has Putin’s regime done to allay the fears of former Soviet slave states like Romania that Russia means it no harm? Nothing. Indeed, to the contrary, Russia has meddled egregiously in the domestic affairs of Ukraine and Georgia and Estonia, causing waves of neo-Soviet panic to spread throughout Eastern Europe.

Aslund writes: “When Putin became president in 2000, he named accession to the World Trade Organization as his foreign policy priority. He failed, because he gave in to petty protectionist interests, imposing a timber embargo against Finland and Sweden, a fish embargo against Norway, and various agricultural embargoes against Lithuania, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and others.”

In fact, Putin’s polices go far beyond mere violations of WTO standards. Russia is also accused of poisoning the pro-West president of Ukraine, fomenting a failed coup d’etat in Georgia and conducting pogrom-like harassment of Georgians inside Russia. It routinely threatens to cut off oil and gas supplies to its neighbors when they show independence from Moscow’s policy line. Many argue that Russia is aggressively seeking to destabilize Ukraine and Georgia precisely because stability is a prerequisite to NATO membership, which Russia wants to block at all costs.

Putin’s foreign policy has succeeded in polarizing virtually the entire Western world against Russia, to a large degree offsetting the mistakes made by the Bush administration, mistakes that could have been turned to Russia’s advantage. It’s a testament to the extent of his neo-Soviet control over Russia’s media and opposition groups that his poll approval numbers remain so high despite such a dismal record.

He brings to mind the gangster portrayed by Al Pacino in The Godfather saga. Claiming to keep his “family” strong he alienates his wife, kills his own brother and condemns his children to a life of crime, the one his own father always said he would avoid.