The leaders of the world's eight major powers, in their annual three-day summit that ended Sunday in Cologne, Germany, pledged to strengthen and broaden their close partnership in settling the exigent issues that are unsettling the international community. Because it came in the wake of the Kosovo conflict that had prompted NATO's military intervention, however, the summiteers were unduly pressed by the need to cool the still red-hot ashes in the troubled region.

This apparently did not allow them to debate fundamental problems underlying the post-Cold War crises. In other words, the Cologne meeting failed to send out a concerted message about a clear agenda for global peace and stability.

Yet this does not belittle the significance of the agreements reached among the summit leaders on international measures to consolidate the precarious peace arrangement for Kosovo and other regional conflicts. It is true that presummit efforts to settle the conflict had set the basic course for the summiteers: Yugoslavia had agreed to pull its troops out of Kosovo; NATO accordingly had stopped bombing targets in Yugoslavia; and the United States and Russia had managed to reach a last-minute accord on a partnership between NATO and Russia in the Kosovo peacekeeping force.