WASHINGTON — Diplomats are paid to have cool minds and even cooler temperaments, but inside the State Department, plenty of America's elite diplomats are privately seething.
They are up in arms over what they see as the hijacking of foreign policymaking by the Pentagon and efforts to undercut their boss, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
"I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, 'There's been a military coup,' and then it all makes sense," said one veteran foreign service officer.
The first two years of the Bush administration have seen what the diplomat called a "tectonic shift" of decision-making power on foreign policy from State to the Defense Department, one that has seen the Pentagon become the dominant player on such key issues as Iraq, North Korea and Afghanistan.
"Why aren't eyebrows raised all over the United States that the secretary of Defense is pontificating about Syria?" the official, who declined to be identified, said, fuming.
"Can you imagine the Defense secretary after World War II telling the world how he was going to run Europe?" he added, noting it was Secretary of State George C. Marshall who delivered that seminal speech in 1947.
Leading conservatives and Pentagon officials say such comments show the State Department's failure to grasp how profoundly global politics and U.S. foreign policy interests have been redefined, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
President Bush's national security strategy calls for a forward-leaning, muscular foreign policy to prevent terrorists and "rogue" states from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction and to confront such threats, by military force if necessary, before they reach American shores.
"Anyone who thinks that you can conveniently separate foreign policy, diplomacy, national security and war-fighting is clueless about the realities of global affairs, power politics and modern" war, a senior Pentagon official said.
Neoconservatives argue that the Pentagon is ascendant because it has better internalized the president's worldview. The State Department, they say, has not succeeded in its main task of explaining U.S. policy to the world and winning support for it.
Pentagon officials stressed that they are cooperating with State, but the military's swift victories in Afghanistan and Iraq have boosted its stature. "When there is a track record of success, that tends to earn a heavier and heavier workload," the senior Pentagon official said.
