A diplomatic shift jells in last leg of Bush term

The Bush administration, entering the home stretch of a two-term presidency, is now making foreign-policy decisions that it would have never entertained at its outset.

The recent accord reached with North Korea on dismantling its nuclear program and the decision to sit across a table from Iran to talk about Iraq's security are two of the highest profile examples.

And this weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice travels again to Israel and the Palestinian territories as the US signals a willingness to engage at least to a certain extent in a new Palestinian unity government, which includes the militant Islamist group Hamas that the US and Israel consider a terrorist organization.

"First we decided to talk to our allies, and now we've decided we're going to talk to our enemies," says Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy expert at Georgetown University in Washington, describing what he calls the "shift to diplomacy" that began at the outset of the second Bush term.

Has the administration forsaken its vision of America's aggressive role in the world? Is it the "climb down" that former administration hard-liner John Bolton says it is?

Or, as some officials at the State Department and elsewhere insist, is the administration simply harvesting the produce of its long-tilled soil?

The Bush administration is tailoring its policies to better fit international realities, most analysts say, more than the world has fallen in line behind an "our-way-or-the-highway" America. That shift, they add, will probably color foreign-policy decisions through 2008.

"I doubt there's been a fundamental reordering of the president's worldview, but we are seeing a tactical change in policy primarily to see if we can get some support in Iraq – and that is setting the tone for the remainder of this presidency," says Kim Holmes, a former Bush administration assistant secretary of State.

Others say the shift is more than tactical. "We're seeing a dramatic change in this president's foreign policy, and though the administration has tried to soft-pedal it so it doesn't look like they've gone in reverse, they clearly have," says Mr. Kupchan.

Central to the changing foreign-policy posture are the changes in the administration, most recently the selection of Robert Gates as secretary of Defense to replace Donald Rumsfeld, a stalwart of the Bush administration's initial unilateralist approach to the world.

That redirection started with the arrival of Ms. Rice at the helm of the State Department in January 2005. But it has been accelerated, experts say, with the arrival of Mr. Gates and the ebbing influence of Vice President Dick Cheney. Gates is seen as a traditional Republican internationalist cut from the cloth of George H.W. Bush.

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