Recent charges and counter-charges between US Vice-President Dick Cheney and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, have further darkened the already meagre prospects for next month's summit of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations inSt Petersburg. But the petulant exchanges have not pointed to the real problem facing the G8, which is its drift into irrelevance.

The G8, however, does have real work to do. The global economic situation resembles that of the early 1970s, which first gave rise to the G5 and later the G7: massive global financial imbalances; a struggling dollar; America caught in a costly and perhaps unwinnable war; bubbling inflation; sharp increases in oil and gold prices.