Cheney's ascension to the number two spot on the Republican ticket tells us much about the kind of foreign policy we can expect if Dubya makes it to the White House.

To begin with, it means that the U.S. will be in the Balkans forever. As CEO of the Halliburton Company, Cheney was among the chief profiteers of the Kosovo war; a Houston subsidiary of Halliburton was awarded the engineering contract to house, feed, and otherwise amuse the "peacekeepers" plonked down in the middle of that quagmire.

But engineering is just a sideline for Halliburton, which is primarily a company that provides services and infrastructure for oil extraction operations. Halliburton's interest in the oil fields of the Caucasus cast Cheney in the role of a lobbyist, angling for the repeal of legislation that forbids foreign aid to undemocratic regimes. The government of Azerbaijan, ruled by an ex-Stalinist despot, has long sought to get on the foreign aid gravy train, and Cheney has been one of their chief advocates. With Halliburton's man in the VP slot, this will no longer be a problem, and the door to U.S. intervention in the region will swing wide open. The Bush Team is sure to go marching through.

Divining the foreign policy positions of George Dubya Bush based on his own statements is an impossible task, since those statements are so few and far between that, taken together, they amount to no more than a few sentences. And these are not exactly oracular words of wisdom, but vague sentiments that don't easily translate into policy. What does translate into policy, however, is his choice of foreign policy advisors, and the news is not good.

The three foreign policy mavens always mentioned in news stories are: Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Dick Cheney. Ms. Rice, former Stanford University provost and a low-level advisor to Dubya's father, is often cited as the chief of this policy group and a future Secretary of State--but this is the story being told by the Bushies, and it doesn't quite add up. Like everything else in the Bush campaign, the foreign policy team assembled by the candidate and his campaign staff has all the earmarks of a classic Potemkin village: a phony facade put up to impress those who won't bother looking too closely.

Well, let's take a closer look at this triumvirate. Rice started out as a music major at Stanford but almost flunked out, whereupon she switched to Soviet studies. Rice became interested in her specialty of Soviet studies as a student of Joseph Korbel, the father of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (which underscores the inbred nature of the foreign policy-making elite).

Having found her niche, Ms. Rice was quickly taken in hand by the Hoover Institution, a redoubt of the George Shultz/Bechtel wing of the Republican foreign policy elite, where she rose quickly through the ranks. As the sole person of color, and a female to boot, in an administration devoted to "affirmative access" (if not action), her visibility was high. But there is nothing in Rice's resume to suggest that she is the heavyweight the Bushies are describing. In the first Bush administration Ms. Rice was the author of no known policy initiatives, and in the interim her career as provost at Stanford has not exactly catapulted her into the international spotlight.

She's the Bush campaign's nod to diversity and "identity politics." The great advantage of having an African American Secretary of State, who would forevermore be known as the First Black Secretary of State, is that it will help sell interventionism among African Americans and other people of color. Polls show that blacks are among the most skeptical when it comes to overseas intervention, generally agreeing with the proposition that we ought to take care of our problems right here at home. A black Secretary of State would help an administration hard-pressed to sell a war for oil in the far-off Trans-Caucacus, or a Vietnam-style intervention against Colombian "narco-terrorists."

Another big factor is motivating the troops--with blacks and other minorities now making up a majority of the military rank-and-file.

Ms. Rice is the PC front for Bush's real policymakers: Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. Cheney represents Big Oil, but what does Wolfowitz represent?

Former Cold Warriors in search of a new enemy have now fixated on China, and Wolfowitz, Dean of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under President Reagan, and undersecretary of Defense in the Bush administration, is their ideological point man. Wolfowitz is a warmonger. His emergence as the policy guru on George Dubya's team signals the complete takeover of the Bush campaign by the War Party.

Wolfowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, is convinced that the locus of power is shifting definitively in the direction of Asia. With the freeing up of the Chinese economy, and the growth of Asian markets in general, sheer numbers, he avers, will soon point to the possibility of Asian hegemony in the world. He compares 21st century China to 19th century Germany, and speculates that Chinese nationalism fed by national resentment over past wrongs will spur Chinese belligerence.

Wolfowitz's message is simple and direct: the end of the Cold War does not and cannot mean peace. War, war, and more war is the inevitable, albeit tragic, fate of the human race, and we had better prepare for it--by preparing to fight the next big enemy: the Yellow Peril.

Wolfowitz has compared the present era to the prewar years of 1917 and the 1930s. War is not only probable, but also imminent, and we must prepare. The role of the NATO alliance is key to ensuring that Russia stays out of Central Asia. To underscore the seriousness of the alleged threat from China, he even raises the possibility of a Russo-American alliance against Beijing.

The policy implications of the Cheney/Wolfowitz team are clear and ominous.