From where I was born, in Rochester, New Hampshire, it was a short drive into the nearby state of Maine, to a place named Wells Beach, where I first enjoyed meetings with the ocean, where my pursuit of the curious first met some relevant varieties of crustaceans. A short distance northward, from Wells, along the Maine coast road, lay Kennebunk, Maine, and, nearby, off to the right, Kennebunkport (see map).

A familiar haunt? In a manner of speaking, since recent days events, Kennebunkport haunts the world at large, because, in fact, it might turn out to be a place where the direction of current U.S. history was changed somewhat, hopefully very much for the better.

There are no secure guarantees flowing from the now world-famous meetings between the family household of President George W. Bush, Jr. and President Vladimir Putin. Nonetheless, while there are no guarantees, the outcome of that meeting could prove to be hopeful, if the right selection of both Democratic and Republican leading figures agree to view this opportunity in just the right way.

The points to be made are chiefly the following:

1. The possibility of escaping from the current set of globally menacing crises depends absolutely on the keystone role of a new quality of cooperation among the principal nation-state powers of the planet: the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India. If those nations come to the needed form of agreement, on the condition that the U.S. Presidency promotes this alternative, the majority among other nations of the world can be brought into cooperation in ways which will deal with both the presently exploding world monetary-financial-economic crisis and the spread of military and related conflicts.

2. President George W. Bush's willingness to cooperate with Russia's President Vladimir Putin, is, at this moment, an indispensable, crucial precondition to any successful approach to the complex of armed conflict and monetary-financial collapse whose effects grip the world as a whole at this instant.

3. The crucial feature of the hopeful aspect of the meeting of the Bush family with President Putin is simply President George W. Bush's commitment to an efficient spirit of seeking cooperation with President Putin on the most crucial of the global economic and other conflicts menacing the planet at this moment.

4. On the condition that the incumbent President Bush embraces that specific quality of intent, and leaves the details of implementation to willing and competent associates from both leading U.S. political parties, actual remedies for the principal economic and other crises of the planet are available.

It is notable, that former U.S. President Bill Clinton is a crucially significant leading figure in any worthy attempt to realize the benefits lurking within the setting of the recently celebrated Kennebunkport event. The former President has grown enormously in wisdom and stature since the period he served in that office. I shall not list here his achievements on that account, but they are reasonably well known, and have been of crucial importance for our nation in the building of the preconditions which might lead to a successful outcome of the recent Kennebunkport events.

What is needed urgently is a dialogue among certain leading individual personalities from both of our major parties, a dialogue which rises above, and somewhat away from the hysterical partisanship over small ideas which has dominated the Presidential pre-election activity thus far. As the dialogue between Presidents Putin and Bush attests, there are certain categorical subjects of sought agreement among a planet of perfectly sovereign nation-states, especially economic and security agreements akin to the March 1983 proposal of SDI by President Ronald Reagan, on which the general economic welfare, peace, and security of the planet's nations depend absolutely at this immediate juncture in a crisis-stricken world history.

The predominance of desire for immediate cessation of the worsening of the conflicts of the Southwest Asia theater, a desire which dominates all sane circles in our own republic, as in continental western Europe and leading nations of Asia now, is the pivotal issue around which a common and urgent interest of mankind can be defined, what must be perceived as a common economic and security interest of the sovereign nation-states of the world at large today.

No success is guaranteed; but, at what has been our global moment of ugly darkness, this is a brief opportunity for change which exists, and which must not be wasted.