Vladimir Putin has become known as something of an anti-American and anti-Western blowhard. You don't have to look very hard to find stories that paint him as a conspiracy-obsessed lunatic, someone whose time in the KGB indelibly stained him with dark fantasies of a near-omnipotent and omnipresent West. And, of course, really does have a habit of indulging in every politicians' favorite game: foreign threat inflation.