The State Department official denies the existence of any rift. "I don't think there is any evidence that Rumsfeld is on the right of Powell," he says. "Powell is with the president on all these issues. You take a guy like Powell who talks about these things and juxtapose him with guys who are not out there so much and you will have some disagreements -- but not in their fundamental approach. The president fundamentally does not want to restart the Cold War."

Les Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees. "The Cold War is not coming back," Gelb says in a telephone interview from New York. "Even if there is an increase in tension with Russia and China, neither one has the will or the resources to confront the United States around the world. Relations can get nasty, but not dangerous as they did in the Cold War," he says.

Gelb reminds us that the Cold War was a time when the U.S. mainland was threatened with a flaming, radioactive, nuclear holocaust. These days, even if a Russian, a Serb, a Chinese or an Iranian might dream of such an attack, they are all but incapable of mounting one, Gelb asserts. So the new tensions between old Cold War adversaries are tempests in a teapot compared to the real Cold War.

"I don't think Rumsfeld and Cheney are unreconstructed Cold Warriors," says Gelb. "They're smart guys."

Yet Daalder sees a mentality that's similar to what led U.S. hawks -- including current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- to form the Committee on the Present Danger in the 1970s and 1980s, in order to warn of the Soviet threat. Today, of course, Russia is but a shadow of its former self -- its economy in ruins, its people dying faster than they are born and its military rusting away. It's got nuclear weapons but no bread and medicine. Daalder fears that by hyping the threats from Russia, the Bush administration could create a self-fulfilling prophesy.

"If we treat them as enemies they become enemies, especially because Russia, China and North Korea are in transition" toward free-market and less-repressive societies, he says. By keeping Russia at arm's length we do not encourage them to cooperate on foreign policy. By calling China a competitor we do not encourage cooperation. By not engaging North Korea we do not encourage more reasonable behavior."

And while the Bush team tries to install its players and write new policies even as things fall apart around it, and petty tyrants from Iraq or North Korea see how far they can get with the new administration, there is a growing chorus of critics who warn that the China threat is an incipient new Cold War.

Not only is China the rising power in Asia, it is the one country that openly dismisses the United States as a role model, seeking to modernize economically but keep tight social and political control over its 1.3 billion people. It also defies U.S. efforts to stop weapons proliferation, selling nuclear, missile and other technologies to North Korea, Pakistan and Iran.

According to a recent publication by Michael Pillsbury, a China analyst at National Defense University, there's a power struggle going on inside China that is far greater than the one some believe separates Powell and Rumsfeld. Pillsbury's book, "China Debates the Future Security Environment," reports that Chinese hawks believe the United States is morally bankrupt and ready to fall within a decade or two.

And while Chinese soft-liners on the U.S. urge their nation to lie low and try to lull the Americans into submission, lest American hard-liners try to transform China into our new enemy, Chinese hard-liners compare Americans to Nazis and wild beasts, and urge a much tougher stance.

This gulf in thinking perplexes U.S. military analysts, who are unsure just who is in charge in Beijing. They try to read actions such as the close pursuit of U.S. electronic spy planes as a sign of hard-liner tactics.

U.S. military officials say that in recent weeks they had warned the Chinese not to fly so aggressively when following the U.S. patrols, which they say take place over international water. This is in itself an issue, since China claims as its own a vast swath of the South China Sea -- which is also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries. The United States considers it international waters. It was over these contested waters that the planes collided, sending the Chinese plane and pilot into the sea where the pilot remains missing.

Meanwhile, Bush said yesterday he is not pleased that there has been no U.S. contact with the crew of 24 men and women, and neither has he been assured the Chinese will respect the integrity of the aircraft and not enter it.

U.S. offers to help in search and rescue efforts for the Chinese pilots went unanswered. Bush himself failed to answer a question yesterday shouted at him by a reporter on the White House lawn: "Are the crew hostages?"

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