Some hawks remain. Mr. Cheney is the most prominent, of course, and by all accounts he is as unyielding as ever in the administration’s internal debates. But his public statements are often more muted than before the Iraq war, when he argued that toppling Saddam Hussein would remake the Middle East.

Mr. Cheney is supported by a dwindling band of loyalists, including John Hannah, who succeeded Mr. Libby as the vice president’s national security adviser but seems to wield little of his clout.

At the White House, J. D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, who headed the group that devised the administration’s strategy to increase troops in Iraq, and Elliott Abrams, who leads global democracy strategy, are known for their relatively hawkish views. Mr. Abrams has assembled a team pressing internally to step up pressure on Iran, a strategy Mr. Bush has endorsed as a way to gain leverage over Tehran.

But that was considered a rare victory. “With the exception of a few — including the vice president — the hawks have returned to their nests,” said one of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top aides who viewed Mr. Joseph and others as seeking to block the give and take of negotiations.

Mr. Joseph, now 57 and preparing for a life as a speaker, consultant and part-time presidential envoy on proliferation issues, is careful not to criticize either Mr. Bush or Ms. Rice, both of whom he says he admires. But he declares as a fact what many still inside the administration will not: Iraq has taken the steel out of the administration’s diplomacy in the second term.

“Iraq,” Mr. Joseph said over lunch last week, shortly after he left his job, “inhibits taking actions that could be perceived as provocative.” He and his former colleagues wonder whether many of the actions that came to define Mr. Bush’s first term — when they scrapped the ABM treaty, walked away from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and raised pre-emptive strikes to the status of a doctrine in the first National Security Strategy — would happen today.

In the first term, as he moved between his office at the National Security Council and frequent meetings with Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice, then the national security adviser, Mr. Joseph’s influence was evident in a wide constellation of issues.