State and Defense: For Once, Opposites Attract

Some of the most bitter battles in Washington have been fought between the secretaries of State and Defense. They are often competitors for resources and the president's ear, though not always along predictably dovish or hawkish lines. In the Clinton administration, the interventionist was the secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, while Defense Secretary William Cohen resisted sending forces into harm's way. In the Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz was constantly sparring with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger over arms control. In the Truman administration, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Acheson openly despised each other. Johnson fed so much damaging information to the press about Acheson that Truman forced his Defense secretary, weeping, to resign. In George W. Bush's first term, Secretary of State Colin Powell felt cut out by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After a trip to Australia in the first year, Powell did not travel abroad with Rumsfeld; Powell's chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson doesn't even recall the two men aboard Air Force One at the same time.

So Washington insiders have noted with interest that Rumsfeld's Pentagon successor, Robert Gates, has taken three trips in the last 10 months with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. For security reasons, the two secretaries tend to fly separately even when headed to the same place. But last summer Rice abandoned her C-32 official aircraft to fly with Gates from Egypt to Saudi Arabia aboard his more cushy E-4B (similar to the jets that serve as Air Force One). In the past year, Rice and Gates have traveled twice together to Russia.

The two are not just traveling companions but allies in every significant way. Both Russian experts, they served in national security during the Bush 41 years (Gates was Rice's boss). "They are friends, not just colleagues," said Gates's press secretary Geoff Morrell. The two secretaries' tandem travels are a "great indication of how well State and [the Pentagon] are working together," said Sean McCormack, Rice's chief spokesman. A senior official, who declined to be named discussing sensitive relationships, described the comity between the two secretaries as a "180-degree turn" from the fractious Powell/Rumsfeld dynamic.

Rice and Gates are both believers in "soft power," emphasizing economic and diplomatic ties. Some right- wingers complain that the Rice/Gates axis is producing a moderate foreign policy, isolating a small circle of hard-liners around Vice President Dick Cheney (who remains influential). But even some conservatives see a plus side to State-Pentagon cooperation. "A lot of people in the [Pentagon] believe that the State-Defense feud went too far" during the run-up to the Iraq War, says Michael Pillsbury, a conservative Pentagon consultant on China. "People are relieved at the détente."

At a speech at Kansas State University last November, Gates spoke out for giving the State Department more tools for soft power, including more diplomats and economic aid, as well as a "dramatic increase" in funding and personnel for the Pentagon's old bureaucratic rivals at the State Department. In Washington, where budgeting is often a zero-sum game, that's true love.