Is Cheney in or out?

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I was intrigued last week by a Financial Times article by Edward Luce about the “Gang of Three” that is supposedly running U.S. foreign policy nowadays: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. According to Luce, these pragmatic realists are informally cooperating to correct the mistakes of the past six years. Key to their success has been the sidelining of Vice President Dick Cheney, writes Luce:

Their growing co-operation on key issues was most dramatically illustrated last month when Ms Rice persuaded Mr Paulson to swallow the Treasury Department’s doubts about unfreezing $25m (€19m, £12.7m) worth of North Korean accounts in order to free the way for the six-party nuclear deal with Pyongyang to ­proceed.

Ms Rice said she spent several hours talking it through with Mr Paulson. She also managed to gain Mr Gates’s support to by-pass Washington’s normal interagency process for big policy decisions – most critically to circumvent Dick Cheney, the vice-president, who remains opposed to diplomatic engagement with rogue regimes.

Luce and his sources may be reading the tea leaves wrong on this one. For starters, there’s today’s Washington Post article explaining why retired four-star generals don’t want to work in the White House on Iraq and Afghanistan policy:

The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” said retired Marine Gen. John J. “Jack” Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq.

My hunch? Cheney, like Richard Perle and John Bolton, thinks the North Korea deal will ultimately fail. If and when it does, he’ll be vindicated. That’s why he let it go through.