Analysts of the Bush administration are still interpreting the administration’s foreign policy maneuvering as a battle between the hardheaded defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, on one side and the more appeasement-oriented state secretary, Colin Powell, on the other. Judging from the past two weeks, however, one can suppose that the battle is over and Mr. Powell has lost.

One piece of evidence was the way the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reacted last week to Mr. Powell’s interview in Al-Hayat, in which Mr. Powell openly disagreed with Prime Minister Sharon about the desirability of negotiating with Yasser Arafat. Here’s how it went at the White House briefing:

QUESTION: … Does President Bush endorse the remarks made by Secretary Powell today to Al-Hayat — in particular, that the administration is working to set up a provisional Palestinian state and, in fact, calling the Palestinian Authority a government, and categorically saying that Arafat should be worked with and not ignored?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, the President has been receiving advice from any number of people and many of these people give him multiple pieces of advice about the Middle East. … So the President is still in the process of listening to a variety of people who have some thoughts to share. …

QUESTION: What about those remarks, though, from Powell? They are quite different than what has been coming out of the White House in recent days.

MR. FLEISCHER: Again, I think it’s reflective of a variety of pieces of advice that people in the government are paid to listen to from whatever source they may originally derive.

QUESTION: So he agrees with them, or does not?

MR. FLEISCHER: No, he’s listening to a variety of the pieces of advice he gets from many, many sources…

Also noteworthy was Mr. Powell’s absence from the press briefings this month when the president met separately with Mr. Sharon and with the authoritarian ruler of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. Noteworthy, too, was the cycle of American diplomacy involving the tensions between India and Pakistan. It started out as Mr. Powell’s purview, and he sent his deputy, Richard Armitage, to follow up. They handled it so well that a nuclear war almost broke out, and Mr. Bush had to send Mr. Rumsfeld to the subcontinent to calm the tensions.

This is all being greeted with consternation in the most appropriate quarters. Patrick Seale, a journalist who wrote a quasi-authorized biography of Hafez Assad and who is still close to the Syrian regime, wrote in the June 14 issue of Lebanon’s Daily Star that Mr. Powell “remains the Arabs’ and the Palestinians’ best hope.”

And a State Department official, speaking on his department’s typical condition of anonymity, was quoted over the weekend by the Daily Telegraph’s Washington bureau man, Toby Harnden, as saying, “there may well come a point when Gen. Powell will wonder whether it is worth being secretary of state if he cannot shape American foreign policy. After all, he can earn millions of dollars a year on the lecture circuit and still spend three times as much time with his wife.”

No doubt it’s too soon for the hawks — or shall we say, the realists — to declare victory in this vast policy struggle. The Bush administration has vacillated a good deal between these two poles for our taste. But for those of us who have been rooting for the policy perspective at the head of which Mr. Rumsfeld stands, it’s nice to know that Mr. Powell, hero though he may be, is thinking — or at least his press leakers are thinking — of an exit strategy.