To the extent that blame is due to anyone other than Vladimir Putin, pinning blame on the Clinton administration is fair in the same way that blame for WWII can be pinned on the victorious Allies of WWI. Just as continuing to treat no-longer Imperial Germany as a definitional enemy lead to revanchism (If it hadn't been Hitler, it would have been someone else, and they would have also been anti-semitic, too. The Black Reichswehr was the source of the myth that Jews stabbed Germany in the back even before the Nazis had any sizable following), so continuing to treat no-longer Soviet Russia as a definitional enemy during the Yeltsin and early Putin years fed Russian revanchism. Even with NATO expansion, had the US under Clinton seen all sides as being to blame in the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution, rather than placing sole blame on the Serbs, Russia's coreligionists and traditional allies, and turning NATO into an offensive alliance directed against the Serbs, but instead had paid attention to the fact that there were atrocities on all sides and invited Russia to have a hand in the peacekeeping mission, things might have gone very differently.
