The Magnitsky Act, calling for sanctions against Russian officials who violate human rights, establishes a precedent which, in theory at least, can be expanded to include any senior member of the current regime.

By contrast, a strategic approach would start with the geopolitical transformation now underway across the globe and ask how each country could become a strategic asset for the other.

Russia, if only by virtue of geography, and the United States, because of its global reach, could exercise significant influence over the emergence of a new geopolitical balance in Eurasia. The two countries’ strategic interests do not necessarily collide; indeed, there is probably a significant overlap, given common concerns about China, Islamic extremists and competition for Arctic resources by non-Arctic powers.

Moreover, there is a significant economic component to all these balances that could encourage the productive relations with the United States that are critical to Russia’s becoming a modern economy — one of Russia’s prime national strategic objectives.

The question arises then how the United States and Russia could each harness relations to its own strategic purposes.

So far, both the U.S. administration and the Kremlin have resisted taking a strategic approach. In her article in Foreign Policy a year ago on the “pivot” toward Asia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not once mention Russia, even though Russia was then preparing to act as host to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Vladivostok in September 2012 in part to underscore its determination to return as an Asian power, and was playing a vital role in supplying American forces in Afghanistan. Putin canceled his participation in last May’s Group of 8 summit meeting at Camp David at the last moment, something no world leader had done before.

On the U.S. side, this oversight grows in part out of the discomfort America has with the very idea of Russian power, grounded in the long Cold-War struggle. Having confronted malevolent Soviet power for so long, America resists the idea that Russia could ever have a positive role in American strategic interests.