Washington ? The United States has launched a discreet effort to broaden and deepen serious consultations with its European allies on war and peace. The talks include a discussion of NATO taking on the dominant command role in Afghanistan and the alliance eventually becoming much more involved in Iraq and perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East.

Two unpublicized meetings of an expanded core group of senior officials from 10 NATO nations this autumn produced no disagreements on the principle of expanding the alliance’s involvement outside Europe, diplomatic sources report. The meetings may lead to a new allied security architecture that reflects global changes since the Cold War ended.

Until now, the Bush administration has been highly successful in containing its enthusiasm for Europe and for diplomacy in general. But both are getting a new look by a White House that is battening down for an election-year run through a sea of foreign policy crises.

Tensions and resentments linger over the strong opposition to the ware in Iraq by France, Germany and Russia. The continuing strains surfaced this week through the announcement of a Pentagon ban on U.S.-financed contracts to those three countries to undertake Iraqi reconstruction projects.

But President Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, appear to be searching for new ground for cooperation in NATO with France and Germany, while giving new prominence to allied countries that joined or supported the coalition of the willing that toppled Iraq’s Baathist regime.

Rice followed tradition by hosting national security advisers from Britain, France and Germany at a private dinner in New York in September. Such gatherings of “the quad” have been highly hush-hush and structured in the past. But Rice added officials from Denmark, Italy, Spain, Poland and Portugal and encouraged a free-flowing conversation.

The same group, with the addition of the Netherlands, gathered in London during Bush’s state visit last month. The most concrete proposal put forward was to consider merging the American expeditionary force now in Afghanistan into a unified NATO-commanded operation during the next year. France and Germany have voiced no objection.

Such discussions reflect a midcourse correction in diplomacy that the administration is making. So does the appointment last week of former Secretary of State James Baker as Bush’s special envoy on Iraqi debt relief.

Baker’s talents and biography ensure that foreign leaders will talk to him about much more than debt rescheduling, even if that topic is very important to Iraq’s reconstruction.

Until now, Secretary of State Colin Powell has masterfully restrained his own enthusiasm for special envoys able to operate outside his control. He is said to have acquiesced gracefully to Baker’s appointment after it was negotiated directly and in detail between Baker and the president.

Bush is not so much settling the problems created by the deep and bitter divisions between Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over Iraq (and most other subjects under the sun) as he is bypassing them. The sharpest bureaucratic infighting on Iraq is lessening as deadly attacks on U.S. forces continue and as Bush makes clear his own new level of involvement.

The president’s Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad, which contained multiple layers of symbolism, served to emphasize that deepening personal involvement. So does the Baker appointment, which suggests that an effective interagency process centered in the White House is at long last taking shape under Bush.

The Powell and Rumsfeld camps still have scores to settle. But their battles will shift to the pages of self-serving memoirs and other published accounts of who was wrong when and how. For the moment, Powell and Rumsfeld seem to have disengaged to a great extent from internal policy warfare over control of Iraq and other hot spots.

Powell is about to welcome aboard a close and forceful Baker ally, Margaret Tutwiler, as the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy. This will reinforce a sense among Washington insiders of an ongoing shift in the policy center of gravity.

Baker’s effective coalition-building for Operation Desert Storm in 1991 is a high point of recent U.S. diplomacy. It positions him well to press U.S. diplomatic objectives with Iraq’s Arab neighbors and with the Europeans. But Baker is expected to avoid getting drawn into the coalition’s occupation of Iraq. That will continue to be run by Paul Bremer, who is sensitive about his prerogatives and authority. Bremer now communicates more often directly with Bush than he did in the past.

Bush has too often stood by as the national security titans of his Cabinet have drawn out their arguments and clashes to damaging extremes. That is a luxury he seems to have decided he can no longer afford.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.