Eliot A. Cohen

Donald Rumsfeld has gotten better press as a secretary of war than he did as a secretary of defense. But the latter job is tougher, so he deserves some sympathy. The dilemmas of U.S. defense policy today reflect more than individual foibles and the difficulty of transforming a giant, often dysfunctional bureaucracy. Even more important, they stem from America's profoundly ambivalent and only semiconscious acceptance of its unique, world-historical role. Whatever the pace at which the Pentagon adapts to that fact, it must do so, and the more swiftly the better.