The North's First Minister, Mr David Trimble, has described the disagreement over North-South bodies at Stormont last week as "just a little glitch" which can be resolved "quite soon".
He also hoped the problem over the decommissioning of IRA arms can be "solved satisfactorily" by next spring.
If it is not, he told a press conference here, then "there will be a difficulty".
Mr Trimble's main message was "how far we have come" since a year ago when no one in Northern Ireland would have expected such progress to have been made.
He called the Belfast Agreement "a great opportunity to create a new relationship within the community in Northern Ireland and not just to bring about an end to terrorist violence but also to end what has in effect been a cold war between the two parts of Ireland in the course of the last 75 years and to a lesser extent a cold war between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom".
The UUP leader said the US role in the past year had been "encouraging and ready to help in whatever way the parties found useful at the time". The US efforts in the peace process had "not been intrusive" and had taken place "quietly and diplomatically". He was "quite sure" this would continue.
Asked by a US journalist about his relationship with the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, especially since he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr Trimble said he had had five meetings with Mr Adams, "at his request". The meetings up to the middle of October had "not been particularly fruitful".
He had hoped that at the meeting last week Mr Adams would have something further to say on the decommissioning issue "but unfortunately he did not so I found it disappointing".
Referring to the breakdown of talks on North-South bodies last week, Mr Trimble said "the SDLP appeared to making fresh demands which had been agreed with someone but not agreed with us".
There seemed to be "a fundamental misunderstanding by nationalists" on the role of the cross-Border bodies envisaged in the Belfast Agreement.