ONCE, AT THE END of a long evening of diplomatic niceties, Condoleezza Rice listened as Lavrov reminisced about the night the Soviet Union broke up -- Dec. 25, 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev abruptly resigned and just like that 15 separate states were born. "He said he didn't know what country he represented anymore," recalled the former U.S. secretary of state. To Rice, this sense of angst and dislocation, of a patriot bereft, was "a way to explain Sergei: He was intensely pro-Russian. And Russia was trying to find out where it fit after the Soviet Union."

Lavrov had started off well -- then clashed intensively -- with both Rice and her successor, Hillary Clinton. To aides who observed their interactions up close, that was not surprising. Coming from the macho, virtually all-male upper echelons of the Russian system, Lavrov did not strike his American interlocutors as adept at dealing with women. And neither Rice nor Clinton had much interest in his Mad Men-like pursuits -- scotch, hunting, and the like.

Lavrov had a particular knack for infuriating Rice: He had "perfected the art of irritating Rice," wrote Glenn Kessler, who covered her for the Washington Post. "He knew how to push her buttons to get her annoyed," said Kramer, Rice's former assistant secretary. "He knew exactly which ones to push."

In her memoir, No Higher Honor, Rice wrote that she and Lavrov initially "developed a good relationship, slightly formal and sometimes contentious. He was, like me, a natural debater who didn't mind verbal combat." Later in her tenure, however, she increasingly came to see him as a bully, out not only to project a new Russian assertiveness on the world stage but to do so whenever possible at U.S. expense. Once, their closed-door sparring over dinner at a G-8 summit meeting in 2006 was accidentally broadcast on a closed circuit to all the reporters in her traveling entourage. Amid the clinking of glasses and the sounds of cutlery, Rice and Lavrov could be heard clashing over Iraq. At one point Lavrov told Rice he couldn't back a new aid program. She pointed out testily that the Iraqis themselves and the U.N. had endorsed it, "but if that's how Russia sees it, that's fine." She was particularly appalled when he took after her deputy, veteran diplomat Nicholas Burns, at another dinner in 2006. After Lavrov "had taken the unusual step of chastising Nick," Rice recounted in her book, the evening's host, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, leapt to Burns's defense. "I don't take kindly to ministers assaulting other people's [lower-ranking] officials at my dinner table," Rice quoted her as saying.

The final straw came during Russia's invasion of Georgia in the summer of 2008. The small former Soviet republic in the South Caucasus had become a sore point in U.S. relations with Russia as it leaned openly toward the West under its firebrand young reformist leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, and Putin in particular was infuriated by perceived American meddling in what he still considered to be the Russian sphere of influence. As Saakashvili openly talked of joining NATO and tensions in two Georgian breakaway provinces under Russian protection escalated, the Russians determined that enough was enough and invaded under the pretext of coming to the defense of South Ossetia, one of the territories.

When the Russian troops entered Georgia that August (after the Georgians started shooting first), Lavrov was certainly not quoting any 19th-century statesmen about the unacceptability of force in international relations. He quickly reached Rice by telephone on vacation at the Greenbrier Hotel, but said little beyond "a stream of invectives," as she recalled it in her book. On the second call, he had three demands. The first two had mostly to do with ceasing hostilities, and Rice was fine with them. "The other demand," she quoted Lavrov as saying, "is just between us. Misha Saakashvili has to go." Rice threw a fit:

"Sergei, the secretary of state of the United States does not have a conversation with the Russian foreign minister about overthrowing a democratically elected president," I said. "The third condition has just become public because I'm going to call everyone I can and tell them that Russia is demanding the overthrow of the Georgian president."

"I said it was between us," he repeated.… The whole thing had an air of the Soviet period, when Moscow had controlled the fate of leaders throughout Eastern Europe. I was certainly not going to be party to a return to those days.

Rice was not the only Western leader angered by Lavrov during the crisis. At one point, French President Nicolas Sarkozy had flown to Moscow in a round of shuttle diplomacy to try to secure a cease-fire. According to an internal State Department cable later made public by WikiLeaks, Sarkozy flew into a rage at Lavrov, concerned that Russia was scuttling the cease-fire. "Sarkozy caught the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov by the lapel of his jacket, and called him a liar," the cable said. "Sarkozy seems to have warned Russia that its position as a 'major power' had been seriously damaged by its refusal to respect its obligations."

By the time Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state the next January, the politics had shifted again, and the Georgia war notwithstanding, new U.S. President Barack Obama had loudly proclaimed his intention to "reset" relations with Russia from the Bush-era deep freeze. To the astonishment of Rice's embittered Russia hands, Clinton even held a gag photo op with Lavrov in which she handed him a green box tied with red ribbon; inside was a large "reset" button to signal the change in policy. Lavrov gamely played along for the cameras even though the Americans had botched the Russian word and given him something that said "peregruzka" -- "overcharged" -- instead of "perezagruzka," the correct word for "reset." (The headline in the Russian newspaper Kommersant the next day: "Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton push the wrong button.")

Despite the bad omen, the reset policy held for a time, and the Americans at least perceived Lavrov to be, as one of its architects said later, "fully on board." With Putin term-limited out of the Kremlin and running things from a temporary perch as the Russian prime minister, Obama had a friendlier interlocutor in the form of the iPad-wielding young modernizer Dmitry Medvedev, installed by Putin to keep his seat warm in the presidency. Lavrov still ruled at the Foreign Ministry, and like the chauffeur of Andrei Kozyrev's analogy, he smoothly steered the car where Medvedev seemed to want to take it. That meant negotiating a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, signing off on an agreement to open a crucial route through Russia and former Soviet Central Asia into Afghanistan to supply U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, and a much more amiable surround sound to the relationship.

By the spring of 2011, when the Arab Spring revolutions had broken out and Muammar al-Qaddafi was threatening to crush the rebellious city of Benghazi, Russia even went so far as to abstain on, rather than veto, a U.S.-brokered resolution at the U.N. Security Council authorizing a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians. But the resolution proved to be the high-water mark of the reset, not a turning point.

Ever since, Lavrov has been furiously accusing the Americans of a bait-and-switch (just as furiously denied by them): He insists that Russia never gave its permission for the Qaddafi-toppling Western military intervention that followed. A few months later, in September 2011, Putin announced his return to the Kremlin, and Lavrov adjusted the car course again. To this day, U.S. officials with whom I spoke disagree about what happened with Lavrov on Libya: Had he been caught between Medvedev and Putin, trying to please the boss only to find out the other boss was mad? Or had he objected behind the scenes and been overruled? "One thing's for sure," a senior U.S. official reflected, "Sergei Lavrov knows how to use the Russian veto when he wants to."

Whatever happened, Lavrov soon made Syria his cause. This time, there would be no Western intervention sanctioned by the United Nations. At least not if he could help it.

Along with the harder line came the inevitable souring of relations with Clinton. "Over time it just stopped working," the senior U.S. official said. "It was part personal, part substance. For her it was Syria. He just would not engage and stuck to the talking points."

Not long before I met with Lavrov, I asked another senior Obama administration official to describe U.S.-Russia interactions on Syria, which by this point amounted to almost two full years of agonizingly repetitive -- and notably ineffective -- efforts to talk about a problem on which neither side was budging. The United States was still publicly insisting that Assad would have to leave as part of any settlement and continued, clearly in vain by this point, to think it was trying to persuade the Russians to get on board with some collective action at the U.N. Security Council. Lavrov was not buying it, and Clinton herself was very skeptical, though she would say things to aides like: Well, if there's even a 3 percent chance of this working, we should try. "The meetings on Syria with Lavrov are all about the same," the official told me. "We say, 'Look: The writing's on the wall. He [Assad] has to go; you're dragging this out.' He says, 'It's not up to us. It's not our call. You're creating a civil war, giving the country to the extremists.'"

And this is in fact more or less precisely what Lavrov said to me when the subject came up.

At their meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in the fall of 2011, Clinton surprised Lavrov by interrupting him as he read through his standard-issue talking points -- a favorite Lavrov tactic that involves his coming to almost every high-level meeting with cards filled with points to raise that run the gamut of importance from grave matters of war and peace to complaining about Americans not buying enough Russian AK-47s for the Afghan army. "No matter what, he's just going to work through his 27 points. He'll do a complaint about [arrested Russian arms dealer] Viktor Bout right next to Syria," the official said.

Clinton had had enough.

"Sergei," she interrupted him. "What about Syria?"

But the meeting produced no breakthrough; it only accelerated their increasing divide. Meanwhile, Putin and Lavrov took to blaming Clinton publicly for the election-related turmoil in the streets of Moscow; for her part, Clinton warned Russia sternly not to attempt to "re-Sovietize" its neighbors. When the opposition cried foul after the December 2011 parliamentary elections and Clinton labeled them "neither free nor fair," that was the final straw. "In their view, she is this neocon of the Obama administration," said one top official. "They wanted to discredit her, and they were just elated when she left."

The low point came last December, during Clinton's final days in office, when the U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act. Named for 37-year-old lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in jail after investigating what he claimed was a massive fraud on the part of Russian bureaucrats, the law established a blacklist for entry to the United States of Russian officials accused of human rights violations. A furious Putin cleared the way for a retaliatory measure in the Russian Duma, barring Americans from adopting Russian children. Putin's response was so fast and angry that Lavrov apparently did not get the message quickly enough and reiterated his previous opposition to the law, since it contradicted an agreement on adoptions he had spent many months painstakingly working out with the State Department. It was the first time anyone could remember Lavrov publicly disagreeing with Putin. He soon got with the program, however.

By the time we spoke, he was back to being the hardheaded chauffeur; Putin was directing the car and he would steer where ordered, even if it meant retaliating against small children in defense of corrupt bureaucrats. There would be no softhearted remarks about the poor Russian orphans. "This is not our choice," he lectured me, "but this is the law of the politics. You always reciprocate. Positively, negatively, but this is something which you cannot change. It was not invented by us. It is the law of international relations."

Soon after the Magnitsky-related tit for tat, Clinton's successor, John Kerry, was sworn into office, and the cycle began again. Right away, he was being lauded in the Russian media; here was a man Russia could do business with. Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the Duma's international relations committee, said Kerry and Lavrov were practically soul mates, "professional pragmatists" who would get along splendidly. When I asked Lavrov about that description, he nodded vigorously in agreement. Then he added, "John Kerry is a professional. He is pragmatic. And this is a very important quality for a diplomat and especially for a secretary of state."

But it wouldn't be easy. After a North Korean nuclear test during one of his first weeks on the job, Kerry placed calls to all his counterparts who deal with the North Korea issue. Lavrov was the only one who couldn't be reached. When they eventually connected by phone, it was five days later. Negroponte laughed about this when we spoke. "We could never reach Lavrov when we needed to, either."

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Haraz N. Ghanbari/Pool via AFP/Getty Images

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