Look who146;s running the world

This small group of conservative Gen Xers is the first set of American policymakers truly at home in a unipolar world. Their adulthood has never included a fellow superpower or the need to reach accommodation with an enemy8212;a Cold War concept none of the NSC8217;s Gen-X crowd can get their heads around. Instead, their history begins with September 11, 2001.

It is the measuring stick they use when discussing their generation8217;s challenge and the sole lens through which they envision the future. 8216;8216;We all built careers in the post-Cold War world,8217;8217; says Meghan O8217;Sullivan, who at 36 is the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. 8216;8216;You have to think about what are the defining features of the age we live in. For me, that8217;s American primacy, globalisation, terrorism and WMD, which is why we do what we do.8217;8217;

Growing up in a time of unprecedented wealth, they saw capitalism as inescapably tied both to freedom and democracy. In a world where everything seemed achievable, it was just a matter of setting the right priorities. They figured, at a young age, that Mid-East oil was of great importance, that the really bad guys didn8217;t come from Russia and that for all the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, the country could still be hurt, held hostage or prevented from striking back. Is it any wonder that some of the generation8217;s best conservative minds serve a president who has staked his legacy on transforming the Middle-East by force of arms?

The NSC, established under the 1947 National Security Act, has long been a home for rising stars. Condoleezza Rice was a top Soviet expert on the council in her thirties when Bush8217;s father was president. But rarely has the world-experience gap between the young policy guns and the president they serve been as wide as it is today.

Generation X has never lived without pop culture and economic prosperity. It missed great moments of national triumph such as the victory of World War II as well as the ignominious defeats of the Vietnam era. Conflict, for Gen X, was the swift 1991 Persian Gulf War, which they watched like a television show. At the NSC, staffers said the gap is most noticeable when their boss, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, recounts his years as an arms control negotiator during the Cold War. 8216;8216;We8217;re like, 8216;Arms control, what8217;s that?8217;,8217;8217; says Michael Allen, Hadley8217;s special assistant for legislative affairs. 8216;8216;I often hear about arms control from the old-timers, but it8217;s so different now. It8217;s about all the places we don8217;t have embassies now and it8217;s very rare, it seems, that Congress is lobbying the executive branch to engage. Most of the times it8217;s isolate, how can we isolate a country even more?8217;8217; says Allen, 32, a lawyer.

The Vietnam war was waning just as O8217;Sullivan was becoming cognisant of the world, a kid in suburban Boston. Today, she is charged with guiding President Bush8217;s strategy on Iraq after already having served as a senior adviser in Baghdad shaping the interim Iraqi government.

O8217;Sullivan, a striking redhead, spent her twenties devising radical new tools for dealing with 8216;8216;rogue states8217;8217; and is widely credited with helping develop the concept of 8216;8216;smart sanctions8217;8217;8212;a twist on economic pressures that aimed at hobbling regimes, rather than the people they rule.

In Afghanistan, she and her team guide policy as the United States seeks to stabilise the friendly government of President Hamid Karzai. 8216;8216;If your frame of reference is the Soviet invasion and how they got bogged down, then I think you8217;d be very modest about what could be achieved in Afghanistan,8217;8217; O8217;Sullivan says. 8216;8216;That8217;s not how I see it. I see an end of Taliban rule and a nascent democracy.8217;8217;

Her National Security Council colleague, John Rood, is two years older and the president8217;s senior adviser on countering nuclear threats. That includes searching for ways to roll back the nuclear programmes of Iran and North Korea. Much of Rood8217;s job includes dealing with Cold War leftovers such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a decades-old arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, which Rood spent his first years in the White House dismantling. 8216;8216;We had all sorts of quotes from critics that the sky would fall if we left the ABM treaty, and no one even mentions this anymore because nothing happened8212;it went away with a whimper.8217;8217;

But for Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism strategy, the Cold War hung over his childhood home in very personal ways. The son of a Mexican father and Cuban mother, the fear of communism was ever present. At Harvard, he wrote his thesis on the effects of US foreign policy on democracy in Latin America8212;a region that has all but been ignored by Bush. In law school, he focused on international law and security issues and wrote his third-year paper on the use of private military contractors in war. He has known nothing since but the threat of terrorism and war.

For Zarate, September 11 presented the challenge of his generation, more than just the challenge of the administration he serves. 8216;8216;Maybe in 20 or 30 years, folks will look back on us and say these guys were the young pioneers, we8217;ll be the Kissingeresque-type folks,8217;8217; he said. 8216;8216;Hopefully, if we do our jobs right.8217;8217;

Dafna Linzer