It takes a liberal to implement a conservative policy-and a conservative to implement a liberal policy. That is a truism of statecraft on the largest scale. Nixon could end the Vietnam war and open relations with China, while keeping the right wing down.

On the opposite front, Bill Clinton imposed wicked cuts in welfare that no conservative could have got away with.The grandest example is the great Prussian chancellor, who brought Germany together late in the 19th century, and while at it created the first comprehensive welfare scheme in history. Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, kept a huge dog in his office to terrify visitors, but when it came down to making the state work, at a time of rapid industrialisation, he knew what statecraft consisted of.

Now we are seeing a most extraordinary transformation in the Middle East. The right wing Israeli leader par excellence, Ariel Sharon, is forcing the pace on withdrawals of illegal settlements in the Gaza strip, against pressures so intense that most politicians in the Jewish state are taking precautions for their personal safety.

He is matching Palestinian concessions aimed at getting real negotiations going toward a meaningful peace treaty-this after years of laughing at the very notion of a Palestinian state, letting his own spokespersons let slip that talk of such was just chaff. His police and army, to the horror of at least European TV viewers, ransacked most PLO schools and police and administrative headquarters, destroying their computer capabilities and trashing any capability they might have had to constrain groups like Hamas.

So are we witnessing a bluff?

Sharon, after all, is a seasoned terrorist who was held back from the assassination of Yasser Arafat only by European pressures on George Bush. He may have been white-washed of crimes against humanity in Israel after his deathly rampage through Beirut in 1982, but American intelligence had and has a fine record of how much blood is on his hands. Yet for four years, as Thomas Friedman put it, Washington 'sub-contracted' its Middle East policy to Sharon. Why should he bother, in the wake of Bush's re-election, to make concessions to Palestine now?

Arafat's demise

There are several reasons why, in his odd way, Sharon might now be sincere. For one thing, the real sting in his personal view of regional politics was removed when Yasser Arafat died. He had personalised the entire regional problems into the persona of one man, something no statesman would do. But the fact is that Arafat is indeed now dead.

A second reason is that his antennae have probably long since awakened him to the probability that his all-but control of Bush's mind in his region was near an end. One cannot blame a leader for taking advantage, for his own state, of a weak and inexperienced novice like George W Bush - who despite his parentage had barely been outside the USA before his election. But Bush has had four years of tutelage in foreign policy on the job, and inevitably he would eventually wish to put his own stamp on foreign policy.

Some straws in the wind suggest that that era has already ended. Only six months ago the papers were full of alleged espionage in the office of one of the neo-conservative clique setting Pentagon policy-the Under Secretary for policy, Douglas Feith, and the direction of the paper flow was from Feith's office, ultimately, to Israel. This so far has been hushed up.

But significantly, Feith has resigned, taken the fall. To add humiliation to his fall, the new secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has been widely quoted as snapping at him, at an interdepartmental meeting, that if she wanted the Israeli position-that he has been so persistent at aping-she would have called in the Israeli ambassador. Feith's inability to separate in his own mind the sometimes quite distinct interests of Israel and his own country is and has for a long time been infamous.

Jonathan Pollard sits in jail for life for lifting tons of documents from the US navy to Israel, and even the highest pressures from Jeruselem on congenial presidents hasn't been able to move the policy-including Sharon on Bush: the intelligence chiefs in Washington have stood as a team in resisting any. It is a sore reminder to Sharon that there are limits to what he can get away with in Washington.

Pollard - a student of the present writer - was an egregious boaster who thought he could move history. The extent to which he perpetrated his crimes has been the ultimate reminder that interests of two states can overlap-but never be identical. And the fact that he was working for the highest level of Israeli policy-makers must be a constant reminder to them of the risks of pushing too far. My guess is that Sharon's sixth sense for the possible has warned him off a continuance of his policy of leaning on Bush.

An old man

But there is a bigger, third, issue. He is an old man now, he just barely evaded arrest for party corruption twice this past year, and he must be thinking of his place in history. Any look at the geographic facts in the region would temper the policy of any extreme right wing policy in Israel.

If the state could normalise its relations not just with Egypt, but all around it, then it could consolidate its position as a highly successful state-a computer behemoth, an enormously successful arms supplier (it is India's second largest, to most people's surprise), and once again a beacon of democracy in an autocratic region; instead of being an international pariah, known for the biggest wall since Berlin's, apartheid, and iron fisted occupations in foreign territories.

It's not much of a choice for a person with brains. The record is not complete, but it looks like Sharon has studied history more carefully recently than in his earlier years. Let us hope that Bismarck is indeed his new model.

W SCOTT THOMPSON, an adjunct professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Boston, is a former assistant secretary of state for the Ronald Reagan administration. He also served as Donald Rumsfeld's assistant at the Pentagon in 1975-76. He lives in Bali and Washington DC.