President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel his planned September meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow is hardly surprising. U.S.-Russian relations have been on a downward slide for over eighteen months and the deterioration has only accelerated since Edward Snowden’s unexpected arrival at Sheremetyevo airport six weeks ago. Nevertheless, while there are some important underlying reasons for the trouble between the White House and the Kremlin, including differing interests, values and perspectives, the mutual disillusionment is much deeper than it needed to be. And in many respects, the Obama administration’s Russia policy is a self-inflicted wound. Hopefully, administration officials will find a way to stop the bleeding before it becomes more serious—which it could.

The Obama-Putin relationship did not start well even in 2009, when Mr. Obama described Putin as having “one foot in the past” while on the way to meet then-president Dmitry Medvedev and Putin in Moscow. Differences over the 2011 U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya also had a significant impact on U.S.-Russia ties, though it was contained at the time and some progress continued. The recent downturn in U.S.-Russian relations began with Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he planned to return to the presidency in September 2011 and escalated during opposition protests following Russia’s December 2011 parliamentary elections. By past U.S. standards, the administration’s reaction to these two events was measured—and provoked some criticism in the United States for being too weak—but by Russian standards it was unwanted interference in the country’s internal affairs that deepened existing resentments and built on an existing sense that America wanted Putin and his supporters out.

Still, the Kremlin would likely have gotten over former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s sharp words but for two problems. First was the administration’s lack of a strategic vision for U.S.-Russian relations, and its related inability to define a positive agenda. [Note to Obama defenders: don’t tell me about arms control—regardless of its potential security benefits, most Americans and Russians don’t care about it, and therefore it does little or nothing to build a basis for a sustainable, cooperative relationship between the United States and Russia while simultaneously cranking up the worst-case scenario generators in the basements of the Pentagon and Russia’s Defense Ministry.] Absent vision and an agenda, U.S.-Russian differences are more likely to dominate.

The second was the administration’s foolish decision to change ambassadors—prematurely, outside the State Department’s normal schedule—in this already tense environment. The Obama administration removed a capable career ambassador and replaced him with a talented scholar-turned-White House official who managed relationships well at the National Security Council but whose background as a democracy advocate made him instantly a symbol and a lightning rod in Russia.

Had U.S. officials been able to wait, the new ambassador could have assumed his post after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated in May—and without having to comment personally on Russia’s March presidential election or holding de rigueur high-profile meetings with Russian opposition figures during a very tense election cycle. Regular minor controversies during the period between Russia’s two elections, some clearly manufactured by Russian official media, perpetuated existing problems.

Once Putin was back in the Kremlin, Washington and Moscow began to face the unintended consequences of their success in concluding a bilateral agreement that cleared the way for Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization, a long-held goal for both nations for which each government deserves credit. Ironically, because Russia’s WTO membership required the Senate and the House of Representatives to repeal Cold War–era Jackson-Vanik Amendment trade restrictions to avoid penalizing American companies, it created an opening for the Magnitsky Act, a bill that would almost certainly otherwise have languished and died at the end of the legislative session, as it had done previously. Russia’s July 2012 law on nongovernmental organizations, which applies pressure to NGOs accepting foreign funds, added fuel to the fire in Washington and may have discouraged the administration from any serious effort to block the Magnitsky legislation by spending its political capital with Congressional Democrats.

The Magnitsky Act gives the executive branch authority it already had to block visas and freeze assets of Russians suspected of involvement in serious corruption or human-rights violations—and its passage prompted the Russian State Duma to retaliate by passing the Dima Yakovlev law, which blocked adoptions to the United States, ostensibly out of concern for the health and safety of children who often face more systematically disturbing conditions in Russian orphanages. This parliamentary tit-for-tat accelerated the downward spiral in the second half of 2012 and early 2013.

Enter Edward Snowden. Russian officials could have avoided having Snowden as an issue in U.S.-Russia relations rather easily had they immediately put him on a flight back to Hong Kong upon discovering that his passport was no longer valid—though tossing this particular hot potato back to China may not have produced warm feelings toward Moscow in Beijing. For whatever reason, Russia let him stay at the airport but didn’t let him into the country.

For its part, the Obama administration has moved from one blunder to the next in its handling of the Snowden case with Russia’s government. Before the notorious leaker may even have made his first visit to the Sheremetyevo Airport transit-zone men’s room, Secretary of State John Kerry was already threatening Russia about the “consequences” for our relations if Russian officials did not turn him over—effectively eliminating any chance at behind-the-scenes negotiation and locking in the Kremlin’s subsequent hard line by turning any deal into a high-profile concession in front of its own population and the rest of the world. Such statements may be understandable from a Senator responsible for his own reelection and, in today’s Congress, little else, but are highly counterproductive from the country’s top diplomat.

Unfortunately, U.S. officials compounded this mistake in the following weeks. While it is difficult for any outsider to know the administration’s strategy, the Obama administration appears to have decided to close off every possible escape route for Snowden in order to force the Russian government to choose between handing him over and keeping him. The administration did this in a situation when Russia’s actions—keeping Snowden in the transit zone with the rather thin justification that he wasn’t really in Russia—made clear that Moscow was working hard to avoid exactly that choice. Ultimately, however, it doesn’t really matter whether the administration’s approach was a deliberate strategy because the results are the same either way: the White House forced Russian officials to make a decision they didn’t want to make.

This leads to three questions. First, did Obama administration officials realize what they were doing? It’s not clear whether “yes” or “no” is a better answer to this. Second, did they really think that attempting to box in Vladimir Putin in this way would produce a desirable result? If so, it was a colossal failure in judgment. If one thing is clear about Putin, it’s that he doesn’t give in to intense public pressure. How could anyone think that he would? This is a leader who has said more than once that “the weak are beaten” and that he does not want Russia to be weak again like it was in the 1990s. Machismo is the foundation of his political persona.

Third, was trapping Snowden in the Moscow airport the smart way to go? Looking at the 193 members of the United Nations, the United States has the least leverage over China, which Snowden left despite an extradition agreement between the United States and Hong Kong, and Russia, with which the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty. Why try to force Snowden to stay in a country over which we have such limited influence and with which we have so many other important interests at stake? Why not let him go to Ecuador or Bolivia, with which U.S. officials could have very different discussions and where the consequences of a major disagreement would be limited? Senior administration officials appear to lack both strategic sense and creativity.

At the broadest level, there is an even harsher indictment of the Obama administration’s policy toward Russia—just look at the reaction to the Snowden affair among members of Congress, editorial-page writers and others who don’t follow U.S.-Russian relations closely from day to day. What is clear in the many denunciations of Russia’s conduct and calls for retaliation is that few if any understand why the U.S.-Russian relationship matters to America. In five years, the administration has been totally unable to articulate this important message in a way that either elites or the general public can understand. Without that, it should hardly be surprising that the United States and Russia continue to lurch from crisis to crisis, some bigger, some smaller.

Russia matters first and foremost because it is one of only two major countries in the international system that are not America’s allies or at least partners—and because Russia and the other country, China, share concerns about the Western-built and U.S.-led international system. As a result, maintaining today’s international system and all of its huge advantages for the United States, U.S. companies, and ordinary Americans depends upon our ability to manage our relations with Beijing and Moscow.

Russia also matters because it can have a significant positive or negative impact on a broad range of U.S. foreign-policy priorities. Russia can supply S-300 antiaircraft missiles to Iran, or it can sustain its current ban. It can continue help the United States and NATO to supply troops in Afghanistan, and to ferry them back and forth, or not. It can share information about Islamist extremist terrorists targeting America, as in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, or not.

Explaining the president’s decision not to meet Putin in Moscow, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said “we’ll still work with Russia on issues where we can find common ground, but it was the unanimous view of the president and his national security team that a summit did not make sense in the current environment.” He may be only half right. Taking into account how poisonous U.S.-Russian relations are becoming, an Obama-Putin meeting would not likely have produced much. But to find any “common ground” with the Kremlin in the future, the president and his advisors will have to do a much better job defining priorities and managing relations with Russia. Hopefully they will.

Paul J. Saunders is executive director of The Center for the National Interest and associate publisher of The National Interest. He served in the State Department from 2003 to 2005.