During George W. Bush's first term, the president's foreign policy team was dominated by Republican officials whose outlook took shape during the 1970s, in the midst of the cold war and America's defeat in Vietnam. The principal concern of these men, including Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, was military power and how it could be built and used to overcome challenges to US national security.

Now a new generation seems to be emerging within the foreign policy team put together for Bush's second term. Its views were formed in a different era - not during the cold war but in the years immediately after it ended. The Rumsfeld-Cheney generation of Republicans began working on foreign policy in the Nixon and Ford administrations; the members of the younger generation started during the late Reagan years and, particularly, during the administration of George H. W. Bush.