WHITE HOUSE TEAM WORK

IT is interesting to observe how flexibly and effectively President Obama deploys his Vice-President, Joseph Biden, and his two most senior Secretaries of State - Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates. As previous administrations have shown there is always a risk of amour proper, plain jealousy or turf wars getting in the way of co-operation at this level.

Thus far, though, these three key aides to the President have seemed to work together extremely well even when there has been obvious scope for overlapping of responsibilities and interests. The key is probably the role assigned to Vice-President Biden. Instead of sending him to a back office, as happens to many who have this job, Barack Obama uses him when the task in hand does not quite warrant his own presence or when it covers, say, both defence and foreign policy issues. An example was Mr Biden's three- day visit to Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania last week where he had to explain why the United States had withdrawn its missile defence project at such short notice two months ago and to get the renewed co-operation of these countries in a revised Nato-based scheme for missile defence; there were both defence and diplomatic issues in these talks. Secretary Clinton and Secretary Gates have given press conferences and TV interviews together on Afghanistan and apparently had no difficulty in deciding who should answer which questions. With so many issues requiring the President's personal attention these arrangements are extremely important.