Are stable instances easy?

We introduce the notion of a stable instance for a discrete optimization problem, and argue that in many practical situations only sufficiently stable instances are of interest. The question then arises whether stable instances of NP--hard problems are easier to solve. In particular, whether there exist algorithms that solve correctly and in polynomial time all sufficiently stable instances of some NP--hard problem. The paper focuses on the Max--Cut problem, for which we show that this is indeed the case.