If you laughed as hard at "Meet the Parents" as I did, it had to do with the outrageous swimming pool volleyball game scene in which the beau, Focker, has no swimming trunks and is given the skimpiest swimsuit on hand by his future inlaws.

During the ensuing "family" volleyball game, Focker is mercilessly heckled for losing points.  Provoked, Focker aggressively spikes the volleyball, and hits his future sister-in-law in the nose, making her cry.  The father-in-law, (DeNiro) pulls the rug out: "C'mon, Focker, it's just a game!"

This is what the U.S. has done to Russia in the geographic, energy and infrastructure politics of international relations, and it is not so funny.

The Russian Federation, unravelling as it was geographically in the 1990s, had been invited to liberalize and join the international economy.  The liberal Western help offered (the Speedos) seemed to disrespect Russo-centrism and dignity.  Russian cultural identity, which had already been bleached by Sovietism for nearly 90 years, faced new competitors.

Not only were the Chechens challenging Russian military prowess and domestic security while sending envoys to ask for US help, Western evangelicals were invading Russia and offering goodies for accepting Jesus, dismissing Russia's Eastern Christian Orthodox heritage.  This sudden rush to liberalize Russia backfired by causing ruling paranoia in those who had played the Cold War game, especially Mr. Putin and his cadre of former KGB/FSB Hier-garchs.

Mr. Putin and others seem to fear that unless Russia can wrest for itself some unifying nationalist glue, Russia's power will dissolve and become a large client state of the West, or, fall back into Communism.

Standing in Russian shoes and according those shoes a national pride similar to what all nationalities feel, one could fathom the sense of lost control in the Kremlin.  The Russian street had become like a long-restricted, even browbeaten teenager, suddenly set free in college with a full Vodka bar.  Those who could remember what the Russia-centric USSR had once been, were livid.

Not long after the U.S. took credit for causing the fall of the USSR, entire air wings of the wealthy were flying out of the USSR to spend and invest their quick gains on the offerings of finer cities: London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Rome.  One friend of mine told me that there is one area in London called "Moscow on the Thames," because it is flush with the limousines and Mercedes Benz's of Russian magnates.  These trends and Russian gangsterism caused a resurgence of "faith" in Communist ideology about corrupt capitalism.

It was in this domestic and geopolitical maelstrom that President Vladimir Putin dug deeply into his KGB KSAs to consolidate power and assert control over Russian affairs, even if it meant authoritarian measures.  This was Russia, playing Focker, spiking the ball and hitting Western inroads to Russia in the nose, to which, as we will see, key players in the Western Industri-entsia have balked loudly.  Fast forward . . .

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation, Alexander Vershbow, spoke optimistically of a new US-Russian energy partnership.  He praised the expected merger of Russian energy firms Yukos and SibNeft, as it would make it easier for Western energy giants to do business with Russia.

Then, after American forces had stormed Iraq and the Iraqi regime collapsed, it became apparent through the Summer of 2003 that no firms organized under flags which refused to fly with the coalition during the invasion of Iraq were being invited to the reconstruction party, including Russia.  Then, the June arrest of Platon Lebedev, a major shareholder in Yukos, followed by Russian Federation arrest warrants for other Yukos officials, came like warning shots over that merger praised in advance by Mr. Vershbow.

If Mr. Putin was sending a warning that Russian Federation firms had better not be cut out of the Iraqi reconstruction, it would explain the delay until October 2003 of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky's arrest, and the fallout from the failed Yukos-SibNeft merger.

Somewhere between Mr. Putin's meeting with President Bush in September at Camp David,  and the Pentagon's official acknowledgement in December 2003 that non-coalition countries' firms could not bid for reconstruction contracts in Iraq, the Russian President figured out that the chance for Russian profit from Iraqi reconstruction was dead.  In my view, this influenced Mikhail Khodorkovsky's arrest as the official death pronouncement on the Yukos-SibNeft merger.

If you think that no sense of betrayal or bitterness followed these events among Western interests, read this scorching criticism of President Putin's actions in a 2004 study (later dated 2005) financed by the Baker Institute for Public Policy entitled The Energy Dimension in Russian Global Strategy.  Note the list of distinguished sponsors of the study on page 3, including Baker and Botts, LLP, Halliburton and a host of Western energy conglomerates.  This report chides Russian stubbornness and nationalism as if the U.S. had none of its own.

You may recall that President Bush appointed James A. Baker III and his law firm to study and plan Iraq's debt restructuring after the mission was not accomplished, however, after reconstruction began.

At the same time Russian contractors received the U.S. DoD boot, Russia was asked to forgive Iraq's debt, which it refused, of course.  Russia had reportedly (and consider the source) been considering debt forgiveness in April 2003.  And previously in context, when Russia asked for U.S. help in obtaining debt relief from Western nations, it was put off according to this 2002 Nixon Center report (see p. 11).

As we watch Russia's deepening military and economic relationship with the People's Republic of China, now more doctrinaire in its official communism than ever;  the Russian Federation's outreach to Iran's radical regime;  the Russian Federation's sale of weapons to Venezuela; and perhaps, Russian espionage in assisting with the defeat of U.S. goals in the South American Free Trade summit in Argentina, perhaps the United States will add just a little more Woodrow Wilson to its foreign policy, and less J.R. Ewing.

And yet, the window for U.S. political and economic alignment with a constitutionally democratic Russian Federation has not only been shut by the Neoconservative theorists, it has also been damned by the pro-KGB/FSB-centrism of the Russian regime.

Consider Mr. Putin's attempt to foster reunification (and many say the future subjugation) of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. That Church has remained out of communion with the Moscow Patriarchate since that hierarchy proved itself "rendered" unto Soviet Atheist Caesar, otherwise known as "Sergianism" after the declaration of loyalty by Metropolitan Sergius of the then Patriarchate to the Soviet state (For a good source on this history see "The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad: A Short History" by St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco).

Patriarch Alexei II, the Moscow Patriarchate's current leader, like many of those forming-up under President Putin's autocracy over Russian society, is known as a former KGB agent himself, recruited in Estonia and awarded in the 80s for services to the Soviet State by Yuri Andropov, according to independent journalist Yevgenia Albats and others.  (See also other sources: Oleg Kalugin, former Lt. Gen. in the KGB; John Dunlop, University of California; Vasili Mitrokhin, former KGB Archivist and author of "The Sword and Shield"; Konstantin Preobrazhensky, former KGB Lt. Col.;  the Keston Institute; Author Amy Knight, "Spies Without Cloaks" Princeton; Christopher Andrew, Intelligence Historian with Cambridge University, U.K. and author Felix Corley).

As Ms. Albats wrote in 2001 about the significance of President Putin's KGB history, his training would influence him to put all other sectors of society, even the Church, in subjugation to the State.  Perhaps this is why President Putin, in his meetings with Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 2003 reportedly said that he could not unite Russia until he united the Russian Orthodox Church, the latter unification being a speed-bump on the way to the former.

It will take a subtle and detailed understanding of how the United States and Russia got here for the U.S. State Department, its Pentagon stand-in, and the Bush Administration to navigate U.S.-Russian relations to a safe harbor free of special energy interests and KGB/FSB apparatchiks on one hand, and balanced by mutual understanding and respect for one another's highest national priorities on the other.

The U.S. must respect Russia's cultural identity, a problem that the U.S. has had fostering democracy in the factional Middle East.  By bending to recognize Russian religious heritage and quelling U.S. evangelical special interest lobbies trying to mold Russian society and get its donations, the Administration could improve relations.

The big question: Can this be done between Mr. Bush and his energy buddies and Mr. Putin with his choir of former KGB hierarchs?

Perhaps when these high officers and their baggage carts are gone, the way will be clear to "Meet the Fockers."