THE RECASTING of George Bush's foreign policy team this week reminds me of one of the favourite Thatcherite observations on the administration of government. After a year or two observing the Civil Service, Norman Tebbit began to say that he now understood how Whitehall departments worked.

“The Ministry of Agriculture looks after the interests of farmers,” he said. “The Department of Trade and Industry looks after the interests of businessmen. And the Foreign Office looks after the interests of . . . foreigners.”

For the past four years the interests of foreigners in Washington have been thoroughly well looked after by the congenial and sophisticated people who inhabit Foggy Bottom, the home of the State Department.

Though Colin Powell himself served with characteristic loyalty and dedication as the head of the department, and though many of his officials worked tirelessly for policies that they sometimes disagreed with, there was never much doubt that the prevailing sentiment at State was that it was their job to rein in and, if possible, halt the lunatic policies of the ignorant cowboy who had become President of the United States.

It is not difficult to find people at the State Department who speak with open contempt of Mr Bush and his policies. Outside Manhattan, there was probably nowhere more miserable the day after his re-election in the entire country.

Many diplomats and officials have honourably resigned in the past four years. Others have struggled on into the gathering gloom, clinging to the distant hope that John Kerry, the son of a foreign service officer, would ride to their rescue.

At the CIA, there has been a similar anti-Bush rage, though with different roots. For years, conservatives have been highly critical of the folk at Langley, believing, not without justification, that a well-funded espionage organisation that has missed two of the biggest developments in recent modern history — the decay and collapse of the Soviet Union and the threat from Islamic terrorism — needed a bit of an overhaul.

The agency has retaliated with an unprecedented onslaught against the President. A series of leaks from Langley in the last few months of the presidential campaign — about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism — were carefully timed to ensure that Mr Bush was defeated.

November 2 put paid to the high hopes of the State Department. As for the CIA, mark the election result down as just another of its failed attempts at regime change.

Now comes the reckoning. At Langley, Porter Goss, the new director, is restoring a degree of discipline to what has become a rogue government agency. At State, Condoleezza Rice is about to ensure that the world, and especially the Foggy Bottom part of it, understands that Mr Bush’s revolutionary approach to foreign policy — confronting tyranny and terrorism head on around the world, even at the risk of alienating some erstwhile friends — is not some weird, illegitimate aberration, but the real thing, at least for the next four years.

Sacrilege! The President is going to have a Secretary of State who heads a department actively committed to doing the Administration’s will. The very idea!

A new unity of purpose in Washington will be especially welcome with regard to the European Union. For the past four years, America has been steadily abandoning the Cold War foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats that supported ever-closer European union.

It once made sense for America to encourage Europeans to downplay national differences in the face of the overwhelming Soviet threat. Every significant step towards the single European superstate under construction was enthusiastically welcomed. But Mr Bush and his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, saw that kneejerk support for every move that increased the power of Brussels, especially when it was at the behest of a truculent France and a complaisant Germany, was not necessarily in US interests.

Part of the problem in weaning the US away from its pro-EU policy has been a deep cultural enthusiasm for Europe, notably at the State Department. The Anglo-Saxon foreign ministries are especially prone to what economists call “adverse selection”. Those who are drawn to a diplomatic career are probably the last people you want defending your interests in the world. They generally prefer foreign cultures, and look with undisguised contempt on hicks in their own country.

The State Department, like the Foreign Office, is chock-full of people who believe, deep down, that Europe is a more cultured and civilised place than the Anglo-Saxon world that they are occasionally forced to inhabit. They feel more at home in the salons of Brussels and Paris than they would ever do at a hoedown in Oklahoma.Their influence, already on the wane, will plummet now. The second Bush term, despite the problems in Iraq and its desire to get European nations to play a bigger role in the War on Terror, will take a decidedly sceptical view of a united Europe. At State, the likely promotion of John Bolton, a long-term critic of European union, will be an important signal of change.

There will be no active policy to discourage European integration. US officials understand well enough that, given the level of anti-American sentiment in Europe, that would be a sure way to hasten it. But there will be more attempts to differentiate between what Donald Rumsfeld called “old” and “new” Europe. That will mean rewarding and encouraging those countries whose foreign policy is still essentially Atlanticist, and which do not regard the US as bent on a course of evil.

This will sharpen the challenge for those who insist that the idea of a choice between Europe and America is a false one. That optimistic assessment will be seriously tested in the next four years.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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