The resignation of Karl Rove will be seen in many quarters as the end of George W. Bush’s administration. With 18 months to go before the next president takes office, the sudden air of finality is a measure of the man’s influence and reputation. Mr Rove has been Mr Bush’s partner in politics since the president’s Texas days, and Mr Bush himself called Mr Rove «The Architect» after the Republicans captured the White House in 2000.

The contemporary situation in the United States is characterized by conflicting attitudes to key issues. Issues, and attitudes, that have a direct bearing on America's role today and tomorrow. Here's a classic example. Patricia Sanders, executive director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, has launched, on the Republican's behalf, a campaign to get public support for a third ABM deployment area in Poland and the Czech Republic. The American public is not at all opposed to ABM systems in far-away Europe - this idea enjoys the support of almost 70% of those polled. But the American public does object to military expenditure and foreign escapades. The House has just cut the allocations for the same ABM systems in Europe by 45%.

The international battle for Arctic territory may look like a Wild West brawl but the real fight for supremacy is more likely to revolve around legal arguments and seismic data than showdowns between ice-breakers or submarines.

The debate about missile defense, nearly 50 years old, has been reignited by the plan to deploy elements of the American missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland. Familiar Cold War arguments have re-emerged as Russia challenges the necessity of the deployment and asserts that it is really designed to overcome Russian strategic forces rather than Iranian threats as the Bush administration claims.

With less than 18 months remaining in her tenure and that of President Bush, Rice has turned her famously disciplined focus toward delivering legacy achievements. But her aims are utterly different from those with which Bush began his second term -- such as the "freedom agenda" he restated in Prague. Democracy promotion in the Middle East is out, replaced by a belated but intense effort to broker a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. Even more strikingly, the "regime change" strategy that once marked Bush administration policy toward North Korea has been dropped in favor of an all-out effort to negotiate a rapprochement with dictator Kim Jong Il. Within months, if the bold new strategies pay off, Rice could oversee both a "declaration of principles" between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the formation of a Palestinian state, and a full disclosure by North Korea of the nuclear bombs and related materials it has been accumulating and hiding for the past two decades.

Russia is more and more conclusively acquiring confidence in itself. The initiatives of the Russian president advanced in an extremely short period of time -- the Munich speech, his addresses at the German G8 summit meeting and the
St. Petersburg Economic Forum, and finally his proposals during the meeting with his American colleague in Kennebunkport -- permit us to draw the conclusion that based on the new realities, Russia is proposing to arrange the world in a new way -- fairly and to mutual advantage. The RG correspondent talks with Vyacheslav Nikonov, the well-known Russian political analyst and president of the Politika (Politics) Foundation.

At a time when Russia has often come under intense international criticism over its handling of disputes with neighbours and partners, it is worth noting that Moscow is behaving in an exemplary way in its current gas row with Belarus. For a start, Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly exporter, gave Minsk plenty of warning about the price increase at the heart of the dispute. It doubled prices on January 1 to US$100 per 1,000 cubic metres but gave Belarus until the end of June before it started trying to collect the increased revenues.

To many liberal Russians as well as outsider observers, the Putin system increasingly resembles a revised and modernized version of the old Soviet system, with an emphasis on nationalism and economic power rather than ideology. Putin himself has asserted that there are fewer black pages in the history of the USSR than in the past of the United States, citing racism, the atomic attacks on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. In their anger against Russia and aggressive support for Bush administration hard-liners, they are inclined to forget that Putin's Russia is the only Russia they - and the rest of us - have. It's the one that has to be dealt with, whatever it is, or becomes. And the countries that are its neighbors suffer the curse of geography. They can't move someplace else. Their American friends live a continent away. Moreover, American administrations change, and the next one in Washington may well abandon the Bush line on Russia.

Russia, Canada, the USA, Norway and Denmark all have claims on the Arctic. International law gives each nation control over an economic zone within 200 nautical miles of their "continental shelf", which is defined as the "submerged prolongation of the land territory of the continental state" - a definition that has produced amicable international agreements almost everywhere except the Arctic, where the geology of the ocean is fiercely disputed.

Today, of course, America and Russia are joined by a number of Great Powers - China, India, the European Union, and Japan among them - in a post-Cold War international system whose contours are still evolving. But what remains true is that the relationship between Russia and America matters greatly to our mutual interests, and to the future of global order, on issues that range from energy security to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We will have moments of competition as well as partnership, of friction as well as common purpose, but one thing we will not have is the luxury of ignoring one another. Whatever our frustrations with one another, we are no longer enemies or strategic adversaries. We have had enough of Cold War, and enough of arms races. In a world which cries out for leadership from us both, it would be a huge mistake to lose sight of what we have to gain by working together.