YANGON, Myanmar — When Aung San Suu Kyi visited the United States in 2012, she was celebrated as Myanmar’s newly free opposition leader after years of detention under house arrest.

Since then, her National League for Democracy has won a sweeping election victory, and the military seems to be retreating from political life. For Washington, she stands as a gleaming example of a successful policy of constructive engagement.

But Wednesday, as she begins her first trip to the United States as Myanmar’s leader, Suu Kyi will be accountable for what her government has accomplished, and what it has not, since she took office six months ago.

An immediate question for Obama administration officials during her visit is whether the time has come to lift the remaining sanctions on Myanmar and to encourage military-to-military cooperation and development aid.

The decision is not just a matter of promoting US businesses in Myanmar. It also involves an assessment of her short record in power, as well as a measure of how Myanmar fits in Washington’s “pivot to Asia’’ strategy and its efforts to offset China’s influence in the region.

Washington’s remaining sanctions on Myanmar are narrowly targeted: They apply to the trade in jade and precious stones and to doing business with some military officials or their business affiliates. In theory, they should not be a major impediment to US investment there.

But “any sanctions brand the country as being a risky place,’’ said Sean Turnell, an economic adviser to the Myanmar government. “And so lifting them would have an effect on corporate psychology.’’ There are no Western banks or US airlines currently operating in Myanmar, he said.

Others think it’s too soon to loosen the restrictions.

“I don’t see the NLD government having a proper policy for handling crony capitalism or rehabilitating the cronies,’’ said Yan Myo Thein, a political analyst in Yangon, referring to the National League for Democracy. “Some of them have even increased their fortunes in the few months the NLD has been in government by getting more licenses.’’

Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said: “The Burmese government doesn’t deserve a wide-scale lifting of sanctions. Its record on human rights has really been mixed.’’

Robertson acknowledged the release of political prisoners, but cited the continued arrests of civil society activists, as well as the government’s failure to repeal laws limiting free speech and the rights of religious minorities and its indifference to the plight of the Rohingyas.

Various governments and rights groups in the West, as well as the United Nations, have criticized Suu Kyi’s administration for doing too little to alleviate the suffering of the Rohingya, a group of about 1 million Muslims living in western Myanmar, most of them stateless.

Since an outbreak of violence in 2012 with ethnic Rakhine — themselves among the poorest people in the country — Myanmar’s Rohingya have lived in camps, confined to designated areas, with limited freedom of movement or access to education and health services.

But now, Suu Kyi seems to have adopted the issue as a priority, placing herself in charge of a special committee and nominating Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary-general, to another independent commission that made its first visit to Rakhine last week.

These appointments are in keeping with Suu Kyi’s apparent preference for initiatives over policies. She has taken on marquee issues that are fiendishly complicated and may take years to resolve, such as ethnic conflict and minority rights, rather than more urgent humanitarian or economic matters. Yet while reaching for symbolic gestures, she has often fallen back on pragmatism.

Suu Kyi recently convened a major peace conference in Naypyidaw, the capital, to tackle the country’s decadeslong ethnic conflicts. For all the pomp of the occasion, though, she was mostly following the lead of the previous government, which had held a peace conference earlier this year, as the first in a series of meetings.

By the end of the gathering, she also seemed to accept the importance of a national cease-fire agreement that both the previous government and the armed forces treated as a steppingstone for broader talks about peace, federalism and constitutional reform.

“Aung San Suu Kyi is not pursuing things which threaten the military’s essential interests,’’ said Richard Horsey, a Yangon-based political analyst. “Her sense is that she should use her huge political mandate to push the peace process forward, transcending some of the issues that bogged it down before — and this fits with the military’s approach.’’