Not surprisingly, Republican leaders are already denouncing President Obama for being too mild in his response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's expansionist course in Ukraine and defiance of the West. What is much more likely to emerge as a bipartisan national strategy, especially in the long run, is a future that both Obama and Republicans have been touting: America's prospective role as an energy export superpower.

Thanks to breakthroughs in the controversial technique of "fracking," or hydraulic fracturing, the United States recently passed Russia as the world's largest producer of natural gas. Similarly the United States is expected to overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world's top oil producer by 2017, also because of new technologies, according to the International Energy Agency. The United States still possesses an astonishing total of about $128 trillion in "technically recoverable" oil and gas resources alone, amounting to eight times the national debt,says the Institute for Energy Research, a right-leaning nonprofit foundation in Washington.

Unlocking a somewhat larger portion of those resources of oil and gas in an environmentally cautious way, while also launching a massive new investment program in green and other technologies, would strike directly at the heart of Putin's apparent strategy for resurrecting Russia, some experts say. It would also mark a distinct contrast from the personal sanctions applied so far against his top cronies, which appear not to have dissuaded Putin at all.  MORE