What will be the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the second term? Condoleezza Rice, the newly confirmed secretary of state, will have briefed her British counterpart by now but much of Washington is out of the loop.

One theory can, I think, be largely dismissed. Pioneered by Seymour Hersh, the journalist, and the more paranoid set is the notion that the United States is about to embark on a new series of military invasions in the Middle East. Hersh is an excellent reporter. But the problem with his analysis is that he has no relevant sources.

If you are a disaffected bureaucrat or a special forces officer appalled at the sanctioning of torture, you have Hersh on your mobile phone speed dial. I have no doubt, for example, that there may indeed be American operatives under cover in Iran trying to figure out where the nuclear facilities are. I very much hope so.

But this does not mean that the Bush administration is about to invade Iran — or any other country.

The only people who know for real are very few and very close to the president. They do not leak. In fact, there has not been an administration in recent times that has been as effectively leak-free as this one.

Last Thursday we found out that Donald Rumsfeld had offered to resign twice over the Abu Ghraib fiasco. That would have been huge news a year ago. But the only reason we know it is because Rumsfeld told CNN.

What we do know lies upfront. We know that the United States plans to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for the next two years. To put it bluntly there are not enough troops to invade Iran or anywhere else as long as the US remains tied down in Iraq.

Surgical strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities are equally problematic: they would probably fail to remove Iran’s nuclear capacity and would rally popular support for the regime.

Bush’s obvious strategy, and one long pioneered by the neoconservatives, has always been to use a democratic breakthrough in Iraq to leverage change in Iran.

That is especially true if a Shi’ite-dominated government emerges in Baghdad which insists on more secularism than Tehran’s theocratic dictators. No American bomb could scare Tehran more than the triumphant Iraqi elections.

Hence Bush’s careful words in his state of the union speech. He encouraged Arab and Muslim autocracies to liberalise but there was no reprise of the “axis of evil”. With Iran he appealed over the heads of the mullahs to the people: “And to the Iranian people I say tonight, as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.”

The speech’s focus on human rights — a blend of Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson — also implied a rhetorical strategy aimed at pressurising Iran on human rights rather than military intervention. “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies,” Bush declaimed.

Get the message? Even Dick Cheney, the vice-president, recently commented that the administration’s first order of business over Iran’s nuclear aspirations would be to go the United Nations security council.