Bill M---based on your questions that is something that is often overlooked in all of this.

We will be voting for a new President in 2016, Putin will easily get reelected and he is then in power until 2024.

So what would a US Russian strategy look like under this WH and would it then be carried forward in a solid fashion or would Putin rightly assume it would not be and he could then force the US into a new strategy to his liking.

Secondly ---any US strategy on Russia must be multifaceted as the current Russian foreign policy is developed and implemented by playing the four legs of a stool approach.

There are four key players in the Russian FP game that we somehow tend to ignore; 1) Russian military and their industrial complexes, 2) the Russian security services, 3) the oligarchs, and 4) Russian criminal gangs ie Russian mafia.

Layered over this is then the Russian Orthodox church.

Russian foreign policy and doctrine can be modified in any way using any combination of these players---we the US have our own players but we cannot seem to develop the adaptiveness that Putin has been showing in recent months.