Like our Prime Minister, Mr Putin has come to terms with US hegemony

At the height of the Cold War it was often said that, if there were goodwill and trust on both sides, an arms control deal could be concluded in five minutes on the back of an envelope. Yesterday, it was.

The contrast is stark between the three-page agreement signed by Presidents Bush and Putin after straightforward negotiations, and the months and months spent in Geneva in the 1970s discussing the technical minutiae of weapons and delivery systems.

Yesterday's deal is broad-brush stuff. The headline numbers are impressive: thousands of missiles will go. But the warheads will remain, and much of what was codified is what was going to happen anyway. Russia cannot afford to replace its ageing stocks of rockets and the United States does not see the need to, rebalancing its growing defence budget towards the "Son of Star Wars" missile defence system and the "war on terrorism".

For all these qualifications, however, the ceremony in St Andrew's Hall at the Kremlin was undoubtedly historic, a significant marker of the end of the nuclear weapons competition between Russia and the United States. It was important as a symbolic moment of adjustment to the New World Order, which has turned out to mean the era of US hegemony.

The main challenge of the new order for the rest of the world is that of restraining American unilateralism. The central question of 21st-century geopolitics is: What meaningful pressures can be brought to bear on a nation so pre-eminent in military power that the daydream of absolute invulnerability to attack from states or terrorists is official government policy?

Vladimir Putin's strategic choice, which is remarkably similar to that made by Tony Blair, is to accommodate the US and seek to influence it from a position of close friendship. In fact, Mr Blair has pursued the same strategy with both the US and Russia, exploiting his diplomatic skills to claim an enhanced influence for Britain in a world where personal relations matter more than they have for a long time.

As long as the European Union is hesitant and divided in its collective identity on the world stage, this is a reasonable judgement. But Mr Blair could do more to promote the EU as a bloc with which the US should do business.

Good personal relations cannot be a substitute for institutions that tie the US into collective ways of working. Yesterday's bilateral agreement is certainly good news – not least because the US obsession with a missile defence shield threatened to provoke a nuclear arms race, and that has not happened. But the US attitude towards international treaties that attempt to restrain the proliferation and testing of nuclear weapons elsewhere in the world remains woefully self-regarding.

Despite important recent examples of the US working with other nations, such as in Afghanistan and at the United Nations modifying the sanctions regime on Iraq, the record of the Bush administration has been disappointing. The litany of instances where the US has shown a brutal disregard for its international obligations is familiar, led by the repudiation of the Kyoto Treaty on climate change and the imposition of tariffs on steel.

Yet the deal signed yesterday shows that President Bush does not want to go it alone just because he can. US supremacy is something the rest of the world will have to learn to live with, but the sole superpower is not immune to reasonable argument. The Independent believes that Mr Blair has supported President Bush too slavishly, in particular on Iraq, but that his attempt to engage and persuade is broadly right and more likely to yield results than confrontation. The cup of the New World Order is half full, not half empty.