President Barack Obama has declared the apparent shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane over Ukraine a "terrible tragedy" and warned that "the world is watching". He has offered full assistance to the Ukrainian authorities to investigate the incident and determine who is responsible.
Voices outside the administration have been less guarded in their comments, pointing the finger of blame firmly at pro-Russian insurgent forces and their alleged backers in Moscow. Most notably, former US secretary of state and probable presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called on Washington to "put Vladimir Putin on notice that he has gone too far and we are not going to stand idly by".
The options for the Obama administration are very limited in terms of direct action, however. There's no doubt there will be a further deepening of sanctions should the evidence point to the pro-Russian forces being responsible for the downing of the jet.
International pressure, not just from the United States, will mount on Russia to draw back its support for the separatist movement. If this tragedy can be traced to Moscow-supplied weaponry, Mr Putin is likely to be put on the defensive and may try to save face by brokering a deal to end the violence in Ukraine.
But anyone looking for a more forceful response from the US is unlikely to get it. Despite the gravity of this incident, there will be little interest in the US for any form of direct military intervention, not least as it is unclear what form such action could take or what it would achieve.
While latent "Cold Warriors" may see this as the strongest evidence yet of renewed Russian aggression, and there will certainly be a toughening of anti-Russian and anti-Putin rhetoric, there are few in Washington with an appetite for a return to the days of super-power confrontation.
It is worth looking back at the Cold War era, in fact, as a reminder that even during one of its tensest periods, the US administration dealt with a similar incident relatively calmly.
On Sept 1, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007 en route from Anchorage in Alaska to Seoul, killing 269 people on board.
The incident occurred just a few months after president Ronald Reagan labelled the Soviet Union an "evil empire", at a time when the fear of a nuclear confrontation was higher than it had been since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Reagan condemned the shooting, calling it a "horrifying act of violence" that was "an attack against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere". He attacked the Soviets for this "act of barbarism", which he argued was "born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations".
Yet despite the ferocity of his words, the US responded with restraint of action. Privately, Reagan told his foreign policy advisers that the US should not overreact: "The world will react to this. It's important that we do not do anything that jeopardises the long-term relationship with the Soviet Union."
The US demanded a full explanation and apology from Moscow, suspended all Aeroflot activity in the US, encouraged other nations to do the same, and held a symbolic day of mourning for KAL 007's victims. But the administration refused to consider any form of military response, rejected calls to suspend arms talks with Moscow, and did not break off any other diplomatic activity.
As with so many points in the Cold War, the unthinkable consequences of actual war with the Soviets constrained US action and limited the response largely to rhetorical sparring. Mr Obama is in a far less tense and dangerous position relative to Russia but is nonetheless highly unlikely to risk any level of response that might draw Moscow towards aggressive direct action against US interests.
Less than five years after the Korean jet incident, on July 3, 1988, the US itself shot down a commercial airliner. The USS Vincennes fired a surface-to-air missile that destroyed an Iranian Airbus flying from Teheran to Dubai, killing all 290 people on board.
Although a legal settlement was reached with the families of the victims, the US has never accepted responsibility or apologised to Iran. Washington holds to the argument that the passenger plane was genuinely mistaken by naval officers for an Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter.
The Obama administration will therefore be fully aware of the potential difficulties involved in reacting strongly to the shooting down of MH17.
The US is often talked about in terms of being the world's hegemon or only remaining super-power. Relative US inaction over this tragic development in the struggle over Ukraine's future will cause some critics to lambast Mr Obama for not doing enough and failing to stand up to Mr Putin - indeed Twitter is already littered with such comments.
But the stark reality is that the US, despite its massive wealth and military power, does not have the capacity to respond effectively to every crisis that occurs in the world. As Reagan found in 1983, so Mr Obama must recognise now, there are significant limits to US power and often a rhetorically strong but restrained response is more likely to serve the best interests of the US in the long run, even when it is faced with an incident as devastating and tragic as it is today.
The writer is associate professor of US politics and international studies at the University of Warwick.
This article first appeared in The Conversation (http://theconversation.com), a website which carries analyses by academics and researchers in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Other viewpoints
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Since the destruction of MH17, Western anger at Russia's actions has gained a harder edge... New sanctions are just a matter of time.
That will not help Ukraine. To do so, we have to examine our own actions as much as we examine Russia's. Without Western bank accounts and shell companies, Ukraine's leaders could never have undermined their country the way they did.
- Oliver Bullough, Caucasus Editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. This is an excerpt of a piece on The Guardian website.
Russia's attendance at G-20 summit in doubt
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There are a number of scenarios as to how things could play out in the lead-up to the Brisbane Summit. The preferred outcome would be for Russia to cooperate on all fronts, including the investigation of the crash of MH17, bringing the perpetrators to justice, and resolving the situation in the Ukraine. In such a situation, tensions over Mr Putin's attendance in Brisbane would decline.
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- Mike Callaghan, director of the Lowy Institute's G20 Studies Centre. This is an excerpt of his post on the institute's The Interpreter blog.
