Word: diplomats
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...Administration's foreign policy credit it to Bush, not Powell. People who don't, wonder where he is. Leaders abroad are not certain he is the definitive voice of America. A former Secretary of State says Powell seems absent from the big issues of the day. Another former top diplomat, when asked to provide an adjective for the phrase "Colin Powell is a 'blank' Secretary of State," says, "Yes, he is." A senior official in the Bush Administration who has worked with Powell for three Presidents in three agencies registers much the same reaction: "I've been struck...
...Powell was soon humbled again by what a former diplomat called "needless unilateralism" over Kyoto. White House rejection of the protocol just as he was heading to Europe to sell missile defense caught the Secretary by surprise. He doesn't disagree that the treaty is fatally flawed, "but the manner of handling it is another matter," says a top State official. As Powell told TIME, "That's one where, you know, I would have done it differently." His preference is not to ride roughshod over treaties that most of the globe supports if he can find a more subtle...
...comes directly from the President," says a State official. "He's asking every day, 'How's it going? What progress is there?'" It colors everything else in the Secretary of State's portfolio. "The constant question is, How will this or that impact on missile defense?" says another senior diplomat. Missile defense isn't Powell's No. 1 priority, but a top official from the Reagan-Bush era says he has made the decision that if this is theology with Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, "it's not his desire nor is it his style to go to battle...
Moderates look to Powell for that. Says a British diplomat: "We view him as someone who will be proved right in the end." But two weeks ago in Moscow, arms-control envoy Bolton implied that Bush wanted the "ranch summit" with Putin in November to constitute a deadline for a deal. Only hours later, Washington officials insisted that it was a mistranslation, but rumors still swirl of an impending deadline "a very few months away." An official deeply involved in the issue tells TIME, "There'll be something by Crawford, because the President is never wrong...
...lived up to it. Originally pegged as a peacemaker between hard-liners and moderates, Rice turned out to be the driving force behind the Administration's early "my-way-or-the-highway" tone on such issues as Russia, North Korea and the Kyoto protocol on climate change. A diplomat meeting with her last spring complained that for the U.S. to drop Kyoto would set the fight against global warming back 10 years. Rice thought that was one more reason not to delay the treaty's inevitable end. And she told...