In his pentagon office, not far from a picture of a Serb gun emplacement (used to ward off civilians pressing for air strikes in Bosnia), General Colin Powell kept an epigram from Thucydides. “Of all manifestations of power,” it reads, “restraint impresses men most.” Let’s hope that Thucydides was right. Because Powell’s elevation to secretary of state means that we are going to hear a lot over the next four years about the virtues of restraint in US foreign policy. The word is already a mantra within Team Bush, the perfect antidote to Clinton’s “promiscuous” military activism. And Powell is the creed’s embodiment. To the new administration, he brings gravitas and vicarious popularity-this son of Jamaican immigrants, who in 1989, aged 52, became the youngest-ever chief of the armed forces, is comfortably the most popular politician in the country. He also brings a rather straightforward view of American military power: don’t use it.

This restraint, Powell likes to say, stems from his background as a soldier; one who recognises the human costs of war. But Powell’s views aren’t inherent in the experience of war; they reflect the particular assumptions of the post-Vietnam officer corps. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam, where an act of heroism after a helicopter crash earned him a Purple Heart. By the mid-1980s he was military assistant to defence secretary Caspar Weinberger and in 1987 he joined Reagan’s cabinet as national security adviser. He has carefully cultivated an “above party” stance, although, like most military men, has evidently found Republicans more to his taste than Democrats (especially Bill Clinton). Thanks to his ability as a communicator and his status as the most powerful African-American in US history, he has-particularly since the Gulf war success in 1991-been canvassed for almost every top job in the land.

It is, however, Vietnam which has marked him most. “Vietnam,” explains the strategist Eliot Cohen, “has become the defence establishment’s morality play, a cautionary tale of civilian meddling, military timidity, and ensuing-but unnecessary-disaster.” Or as Powell put it in his autobiography My American Journey, “Many of my generation of Vietnam-era officers vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand.”

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