New transformationalists versus Realists and old traditionalists

Taken together, all these changes have signaled a power shift in Washington.

Today there is a rebalancing of influence between the new transformationalists and the old traditionalists, between those who cry freedom and those who fret about its burdens, between the ideologues and the policy professionals.

Power, in other words, is shifting away from the hawks who believe that America can do as it pleases, who embrace American hegemony, even empire, as a righteous cause and see Iraq as the first step toward a grand democratic transformation of the Arab world.

That power seems to be increasingly falling to moderates who stress American limitations—carefully matching commitments to resources—and cultivating allies, and who worry that by getting bogged down in grand designs for Iraq, America is failing to deal with other dire threats like North Korea.

It is a clash between unabashed champions of U.S. power, like Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney—as well as influential neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, all of them latter-day Reaganites—and the realists who grew up embracing containment during Vietnam and the cold war. The latter include wavering realists like Rice and powerful GOP senators such as Richard Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and John Warner, who runs the Armed Services Committee.

Even within Rice’s NSC, the ideologues are losing altitude. “Traditional realists are more energized in presenting their view assertively,” says Dimitri Simes of the Nixon Center. “A lot of people are becoming quite angry with the ideologues. The feeling is they are just indifferent to facts.”