They are expected to advocate direct negotiations with Iran and Syria to help the US in Iraq — anathema to hardliners such as Dick Cheney and neoconservatives — and to abandon the goal of making Iraq a stable democracy. Mr Gates also co-authored a report in 2004 with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Adviser, in which they advocated offering incentives to Iran, including the ending of sanctions, to persuade Tehran to stop short of building nuclear weapons.

Mr Gates, who expressed grave doubts about the invasion of Iraq, also told the Bush Administration just two years ago that hopes of regime change in Iran were totally unrealistic and that the refusal of the Administration to talk directly to Tehran “was harming US interests”. He also said that efforts to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict should be at the heart of US foreign policy.

Mr Gates is a disciple of the grand old man of US foreign policy realists, Brent Scowcroft, who was the first President Bush’s National Security Adviser. Mr Scowcroft, an old friend of the Bush family, has been totally shunned by the current Administration and adamantly opposed the invasion of Iraq. He has been an outspoken critic of the neoconservative vision of transforming the world through the use of American force. Now, he is again back in the ascendency.

David Frum, a co-author of Mr Bush’s 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech, told The Times that Mr Baker was now “Secretary of State in all but name”, and that the appointment of Mr Gates signalled a new phase of foreign policy where negotiation, and carrots rather than sticks, would dominate.

Frank Gaffney, a Pentagon official under Ronald Reagan, described Mr Gates’s appointment as the “beginning of the Baker regency”. Mr Frum said that he suspects Mr Baker is already negotiating with Tehran — a policy he deplores — and that he believed the White House will offer Iran both an end of sanctions and a “sphere of influence” in Iraq.

Mr Brzezinski told The Times that Mr Gates’s nomination was the beginning of a “major corrective” in US foreign policy on the Middle East.

“The most immediate change will be in tone and style because he is a very different personality to Rumsfeld,” Mr Brzezinski said. “Long-term changes probably involve a more open-minded reassessment of what has been going on because he is less inclined to be sympathetic to the neo- con perspective.”

Mr Brzezinski suggested that the departure of Mr Rumsfeld left Dick Cheney, the Vice- President, an increasingly isolated figure. “Cheney is a fading light,” he said. There were rumours in Washington yesterday that Mr Cheney had tried unsuccessfully to block Mr Rumsfeld’s removal.

Another potential loser with the ascendency of the old guard is John Bolton, the hardline US Ambassador to the United Nations.

Mr Gates and Mr Scowcroft also groomed a young Soviet Union expert in the late 1980s for a role on the first President Bush’s national security team: Condoleezza Rice, who in the 1990s was another foreign policy “realist”.

But in Mr Bush’s first term, she aligned herself with the hardliners and helped to write the document that first articulated the policy of pre-emptive war. Since 2004, she has been quietly moving the Administration away from the aggression of its first term. She will fit smoothly into the new team.

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