The Alliance Builder

By Massimo Calabresi

Bush's Secretary of State COLIN POWELL, a moderate in an Administration full of hard-liners, has maintained near perfect decorum with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in public. But the three men fought pitched battles behind the scenes over most of the Administration's foreign policies. For the first time this year, Powell started winning a few. Powell, 65, has long taken exception to the conservatives' muscular brand of unilateralism, arguing instead that the U.S. should act in concert with allies. He scored a crucial victory in August when he persuaded President Bush to engage the U.N. before attacking Iraq. Powell's supporters claim victories for his brand of allied efforts elsewhere, in Asia, Russia and the Middle East. "We've got a fundamentally multilateral foreign policy," claims a senior State official. But there are no permanent victories for Powell. His detractors say he is doing little more than sanding the rough edges off the hard-liners' battering ram. "You'd have to say," says a senior Administration official, "the Cheney-Rumsfeld wing overall has been predominant because we're about to go to war with Saddam." --By Massimo Calabresi