Washington loves nothing better than the “who’s up, who’s down?” power game. Currently the buzz is that the team of Rice and Gates is up. And having supplanted the team of Cheney and Rumsfeld, it looks like Rice and Gates will dominate President Bush’s foreign policy team for the last two years of his presidency.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence Robert Gates are cast in every bit of the conservative mould as is Bush. Rice is a hard-line Russia expert. Gates is a former Central Intelligence Agency director. Their pro-Bush credentials are impeccable. Neither can be accused of any pandering to despots and terrorists. But gone now is the arrogance of former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and apparently fading is the influence of Vice President Dick Cheney and the “take no prisoners” philosophy in foreign policy.

Refreshing, for instance, is the firm and transparent way in which Gates has handled the scandal over the Walter Reed military hospital. The Washington Post exposed a litany of neglect and poor management in the hospital that handles many wounded American servicemen from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rumsfeld is as emotional as anybody over the returning injured. But whereas Rumsfeld, confronted by scandal and bad news, was more inclined to circle the wagons and tough it out, Gates moved swiftly to remedy the situation, not even waiting for the results from departmental and congressional investigations. He fired both the general commanding Walter Reed and the secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, and ordered swift improvements at the hospital.

Before he resigned last year, Rumsfeld did much to modernise and streamline the Army. He oversaw a brilliant, fast-moving military campaign that rid the world of Saddam Hussein. But he sadly misjudged the number of troops necessary to occupy Iraq and was guilty of poor planning in carrying out the country’s post-war reconstruction.

Meanwhile, Rice has been able to skilfully modify major aspects of the administration’s foreign policy. While supporting the president’s goals of thwarting the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran and fostering freedom in the Arab world, she has been able to shift the US from a confrontational and sometimes threatening unilateral style to the diplomacy of engagement, often in a multilateral framework. For instance, the US will soon engage in a meeting of Iraq and its neighbours designed to discuss stability in the war-torn region. Iran will be one of the participants.

Rice is taking advantage of changing conditions in adversarial nations such as North Korea and Iran. The new approach in dealing directly with these sates has spawned criticism from ultraconservatives such as John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN, but Rice enjoys the continuing confidence of the president. She effectively fenced in Bolton at the UN, although he sought higher roles. She now is neutralising some of Cheney’s harder-line positions. — The Christian Science Monitor