KEY POINTS:
The opposition has been playing, well, classic Opposition politics over Prime Minister Helen Clark's trip to Washington this week.
On the eve of her visit, it tried to raise public expectations that she should be coming home with the okay for a free-trade agreement with the United States.
When she didn't get one, it denounced her visit as "a huge foreign policy failure", citing the fact that President Bush smiled when Helen Clark mentioned such a meeting while in the Oval Office.
National's leader, John Key, is scheduled to go to Washington later this year, where he may be gently persuaded by officials that on a scale longer than yesterday's news grab, the "huge foreign policy failure" is regarded as a "huge milestone" in the less-than-ideal relationship.
The meeting between Clark and Bush put the seal on a move that will see closer consultation at a political and official level that will draw the countries closer, whether that is evident or not at a public level.
Clark does not have a tangible trophy to take back home after this trip but it has been as important a trip as any of the others since the Anzus rift, possibly more.
After Sir Robert Muldoon's visit in 1983, while New Zealand was still a member of the Anzus, there have been only three official prime ministerial visits since New Zealand's anti-nuclear legislation was passed in 1987: Jim Bolger in 1995; Helen Clark in 2002, and this year.
Each was a breakthrough in its own way: Bolger's because he was the first there after 10 years of the long chill - 10 years of no top-level contact.
That visit, however, was agreed to under the mistaken belief by Bill Clinton's Administration that National could "fix" the problem.
Clark's first trip was a breakthrough because she was a Labour leader and had been at the heart of the Government that had "caused" the rift.
She showed, on the surface at least, that National did not have the monopoly on the US relationship.
In 2001, with New Zealand troops having just gone to Afghanistan, it would have been more than churlish for Bush not to have hosted Clark.
But it was clear that the friendship was limited.
The United States was still holding out hope that a National Government could change the law, and its suspicions of Clark were reinforced when senior Labour figures Michael Cullen and Trevor Mallard invoked the US-as-bogeyman spectre in the 2005 election.
The change in the relationship had its beginnings in a speech by former Ambassador Charles Swindells, an Oregon businessman who raised a lot of money for Bush's election.
On Swindells' departure in 2005, and just six weeks out from the last election, he delivered a speech at the July 4 celebrations in Wellington.
Apart from a few personal observations about the baffling attraction of Vegemite, it was a speech that had clearly been crafted by his masters in Washington.
The message was that the US believed there was a lack of trust and respect in the relationship and that something needed to be addressed.
Clark responded unenthusiastically, saying she didn't think the relationship was in bad shape at all.
She was also annoyed with the speech and said New Zealand had bent over backwards to help the US.
Labour has been wary of reviews that might simply be another way of putting pressure on New Zealand to repeal its anti-nuclear law.
Former Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs John McKinnon was sent to Washington after the Swindells' speech to find out more about it.
The review was of the United States' own interests and their accumulating reasons why it decided that it wanted to have a better relationship with New Zealand: its record on promoting democracy, especially in the Pacific, its growing ties with Southeast Asia, its use in helping to contain North Korea and Iran's nuclear ambitions; its record on counter-terrorism; and its usefulness in promoting free trade.
When it became clear to Labour that the US was not pursuing a change to the legislation, it had every reason to sign up to the new start.
In that sense there has been a mindshift on Labour's part, as well as the major shift in the United States' thinking.
