Insider : Presidential Timber? Cheney Lets Chips Fall as He Gains Stature : The defense secretary has gained global recognition as a warrior-diplomat. Even the Kremlin has offered a nudge toward the White House.

After taping a brief interview with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney during his recent visit to Moscow, a Soviet television journalist half-kiddingly asked his American guest if he was considering running for President.

Cheney demurred, but his host, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, interjected: “If you run, we’ll support you.”

Pardon? The Soviet defense minister endorsing Dick Cheney for President? Cheney, the Administration’s unrepentant hawk, the self-proclaimed hard-liner on the Soviet Union? Cheney, the Western warmonger Soviet leaders used to quote in counterpoint whenever someone suggested cutting the Soviet defense budget?

That such an exchange should even take place is a stunning measure of how far relations between the superpowers have progressed and how high Cheney’s stock has risen. The 49-year-old former congressman from Wyoming has quietly but unambiguously staked out a high-profile role as the Bush Administration’s warrior-diplomat.

He has firmly established his authority over the military services at the Pentagon, most recently by his brusque firing of Air Force Chief of Staff Michael J. Dugan for revealing U.S. war plans in the Persian Gulf.

Now Cheney is beginning to play a part on the global stage.

Bush called upon Cheney--not Secretary of State James A. Baker III--to “ask” Saudi King Fahd if he would like 250,000 U.S. troops deployed to protect against further Iraqi aggression in the Middle East.

It was Cheney who sat down in Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Kremlin office and confronted the Nobel Peace Prize winner on Moscow’s continued high spending on military hardware. And Cheney broke the news earlier this year to the South Koreans and Japanese that the United States planned gradually to withdraw its security umbrella from the region.

“He’s really come into his own,” a senior Administration official said of the defense secretary, who arrived at the Pentagon 18 months ago with a reputation as a savvy conservative with no particular expertise on military matters. Cheney avoided military service in the 1960s because he was married with two children when his student deferment expired.

Since assuming the defense post in April, 1989, Cheney has impressed leaders around the globe and many in Washington with his fine political instincts and a forceful but understated manner. “He chooses his spots very carefully. He has shown that he can do foreign affairs, too,” an Administration colleague said.

The Persian Gulf deployment has thrust Cheney to the forefront of an Administration that seems unable to focus on more than one domestic crisis and one foreign policy crisis at a time. Some in Washington see Baker’s standing on the wane as the defense chief’s star rises, particularly after revelations that State Department diplomats in Baghdad and Washington--shortly before the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait--appeared to signal that the United States was unconcerned about the fate of Kuwait.

But Administration insiders say that Baker hasn’t slipped; rather, Cheney has risen to nearly co-equal status with the secretary of state. The two remain close friends--they spent last weekend together fishing in Wyoming--and apart from each man’s obvious competitive nature, they are not rivals for power.

A senior official who has worked closely with both men described Baker as thin-skinned and ambitious. Cheney, he said, has a thicker hide and just as much ambition--but he manages to hide it better than his friend at Foggy Bottom.

To be sure, Cheney’s current enhanced stature derives mostly from two successful but limited military operations--last December’s invasion of Panama and the rapid, massive buildup of forces in the Middle East. If American blood is shed in a protracted war in the Persian Gulf without a clear-cut U.S. victory, he could find himself out of favor, out of a job and certainly out of the running for president.

Cheney aides acknowledge that he is much more likely to suffer if the gulf operation backfires than are the other two chief architects of U.S. military policy in the region, White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Scowcroft, a retired Air Force three-star general, is seen in Washington as a quiet professional without Cheney’s partisan ideological baggage. Powell’s uniform gives him virtual immunity from political retribution, even though he designed the American force of a quarter of a million troops now sitting in the Saudi sands.

Like a bridge pier, the bulk of which is underwater, Cheney’s visibility on the gulf crisis masks the far deeper effort he has put into assessing changes in the Soviet Union and their effect on U.S. defense spending and defense planning into the next century.

Early in the Bush Administration he staked out a position to the right of the President in predicting that Gorbachev’s reform efforts ultimately would fail and that the current Soviet leadership would be replaced by hard-liners hostile to the West. Earlier this year he and CIA Director William H. Webster clashed publicly over Soviet military capabilities, with Webster arguing the more dovish position that Moscow could never reverse the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

Many dismissed Cheney as a Cold War relic in an age of warming superpower relations.

But the defense secretary acknowledged in Moscow 10 days ago that his position has gradually changed. He now says his view of the Soviet Union and its intentions toward the West has evolved into a “optimistic skepticism.” He reserved comment on whether he still believes that Gorbachev will fail.

“While I did, in fact, begin as a skeptic based on past experience, I have been persuaded by the events of the last 18 months that we have, indeed, entered a new era of U.S.-Soviet relations,” Cheney told a press conference at the conclusion of three days of talks with senior Soviet civilian and military leaders.

“If current positive trends continue,” Cheney added, “it will be possible for us to say that we do not consider the Soviets an adversary, that, indeed, it’s possible for us to cooperate in ways that haven’t been possible for the last 40-some years.”

The mission to Moscow marked Cheney’s first visit to the Soviet Union as defense secretary. (He visited the Soviet Union twice as a congressman and once during the Ford Administration, when he was White House chief of staff.)

He was struck by the increased openness of his Soviet hosts and the growing desperation of the nation’s economic plight. And yet, the Soviets unwittingly cemented his opinion of the need for fundamental reform by showing him top-line military units, equipment and facilities.

Cheney visited the underground command post of the Moscow region air defense forces--the first time a Westerner has been allowed to see such a facility. He also witnessed a demonstration of the prowess of Soviet airborne troops, complete with a display of precision parachuting and the airdrop of seven-ton armored vehicles--sophisticated little battlefield weapons unlike anything in the U.S. arsenal. (The main American armored personnel carrier weighs 20 tons.)

The quality of the military men and machines Cheney saw convinced him that the Soviet Union is in fact two separate and unequal nations--a hapless civilian economy that cannot produce basic goods for its people and a richly armed superpower where the military goes to the front of every line.

Cheney, who despite his reserved demeanor has no lack of self-confidence, confronted the Soviets on this in a very public way. He took his concerns and complaints about the Soviet system to the belly of the beast, the Kremlin itself.

“Why is there still such a high level of production of military hardware in the Soviet Union?” he demanded of a joint session of the defense and foreign affairs committees of the Supreme Soviet, the nation’s chief legislative body.

He then startled his hosts by disclosing that U.S. intelligence believes that the Soviets are working on “four or five” new intercontinental nuclear missiles. The members of the Supreme Soviet appeared unaware of the missile programs. Yazov, clearly annoyed with Cheney, later said only two new missiles are under development.

Privately, Cheney raised the same concerns with Gorbachev, according to aides who attended the hourlong session Oct. 17. One aide said Cheney “tweaked” the Soviet leader on weapons production and the sluggish pace of the demilitarization of Soviet society--this on the day after the announcement that Gorbachev had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

“He’s like a good trial lawyer,” this aide said of the defense secretary. “He knows what issues to raise when, and which issues not to raise at all.” He said that although Gorbachev got testy at times during his meeting with Cheney, the Soviet leader likes a vigorous debate and the two men left with greater respect for each other.

While Cheney is not ready yet to plant himself in the camp of the doves, his views have clearly undergone a transformation that parallels the political reformation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

On the night of his arrival in Moscow, Cheney was Yazov’s guest at a dinner at a Ministry of Defense dacha outside of the capital. After a series of windy toasts, the American defense secretary rose and did something he had never done, according to a longtime Cheney aide.

He lifted his glass and said simply, “Peace.”