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29 janvier 2007 — William Pfaff publie dans le numéro de The New York Review of Books daté du 15 février 2007 une longue étude sur la politique étrangère des USA. Cet essai s’inscrit dans le diagnostic général en train d’être posé sur l’orientation de cette puissance, — notamment la réflexion “Beyond Hegemony” — à un moment où les indices s’accumulent d’une puissante crise intérieure liée à la crise extérieure sous la conduite de GW Bush. Il a d’ores et déjà soulevé un réel intérêt dans les cercles académiques et intellectuels à Washington.
C’est évidemment un travail d’historien, et de la meilleure sorte car c’est bien le cas de William Pfaff, — un homme qui se décrit lui-même comme un “gaulliste” de conception. L’histoire de la politique extérieure des Etats-Unis à partir de ses fondements et de ses racines, est magistralement exposée. Elle nous montre combien le processus actuel s’inscrit dans une impitoyable logique et elle fait bon marché de la thèse “accidentaliste” selon laquelle les événements actuels seraient liés au seul G.W. Bush. Comme il faut s’y attendre avec un historien de la qualité de Pfaff, c’est bien entendu une appréciation critique dont on découvre le développement, surtout pour la période de la Guerre froide jusqu’à aujourd’hui qui est le nœud du drame conduisant vers la tragédie. Pfaff montre brillamment qu’une “politique alternative” aurait été possible, notamment en s’appuyant sur les conceptions d’une école réaliste et historique, selon précisément l’approche d’un George Keenan, que lui-même (Pfaff), en collaboration avec Edmund Stillman, proposa à la fin des années 1950.
Ci-dessous nous présentons ce passage où Pfaff évoque cette “alternative policy” (des notes précisant les citations figurent dans le texte original du New York Review of Books). Nous le complétons des quelques paragraphes de conclusion où William Pfaff présente les perspectives qu’il envisage pour son pays.
«Is there an alternative policy? At the time of George Kennan's death in 2005, much was made of the cold war policy of containment, of which he was the author, and its vindication by the collapse of the Soviet Union from inner decay, as he had foreseen. Not much was written about Kennan's general view of the nature of relations between states, which was in radical contrast with the policies and assumptions of the present US government and most of those concerned with foreign policy in Washington. Kennan's volume of autobiographical reflections, ‘Around the Cragged Hill’, published in 1993 when he was eighty-nine, contained his mature reflections on this subject, as well as his thoughts on American foreign policy.
»He did not think that democracy along North American and Western European lines can prevail internationally. “To have real self-government, a people must understand what that means, want it, and be willing to sacrifice for it.” Many nondemocratic systems are inherently unstable. “But so what?” he asked. “We are not their keepers. We never will be.” (He did not say that we might one day try to be.) He suggested that nondemocratic societies should be left “to be governed or misgoverned as habit and tradition may dictate, asking of their governing cliques only that they observe, in their bilateral relations with us and with the remainder of the world community, the minimum standards of civilized diplomatic intercourse.”[8]
»With the cold war over, Kennan saw no need for the continuing presence of American troops in Europe, and little need for them in Asia, subject to the security interests of Japan, allied to the United States by treaty. He deplored economic and military programs that existed in “so great a profusion and complexity that they escape the normal possibilities for official, not to mention private oversight.” He asked why the United States was [in 1992] giving military assistance to forty-three African countries and twenty-two (of twenty-four) countries in Latin America. “Against whom are these weapons conceivably to be employed?... [Presumably] their neighbors or, in civil conflict, against themselves. Is it our business to prepare them for that?”
»In the late 1950s, a colleague, the late Edmund Stillman, and I circulated an argument that eventually became a magazine article and book, suggesting that the American obsession with Soviet Communist power was turning the United States toward an American version of Marxist historicism and ideological messianism. We said that Washington had fallen under the influence of “the ideological politics of the Thirties and moral fervor of the second world war” in assuming that we and Soviet Russia were struggling, so to speak, for the soul of the world.[9]
»We argued that quite the opposite was true. We said that common sense about the nature of Russia's and China's real interests suggested that time was not on their sides, and that Kennan's policy of containing the major Communist powers, until what Marx would have called their internal contradictions undermined them, was the correct one. The interest of China was mainly to weaken Soviet supremacy among the Communists. Russia itself was in material decline, its messianism faded. Western Europe, Japan, and other Asian nations were increasingly dynamic, and could be expected to reclaim their pre-war influence. The 1950s, we concluded, were already a time of plural power centers and multiple interests, a system in which international power and ambitions were increasingly expressed by independent state actors, a system in which the United States could flourish, but the Soviet Union, in the long term, could not. We ended by recommending patience.
»This went against much thinking of the period. In retrospect, it is the loser's tale, describing a road not taken. It might seem of little interest now, if the direction actually followed had not proven so disastrous. It seems scarcely imaginable that the present administration could shift course away from the interventionist military and political policies of recent decades, let alone its own highly aggressive version of them since 2001, unless it were forced to do so by (eminently possible) disaster in the Middle East. Whether a new administration in two years' time might change direction seems the relevant question.
»Yet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the inherent impossibility of success.
»The intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained. What is the threat that America keeps at bay? Neither China nor Russia directly threatens Western security interests, at least in the opinion of most governments other than the one in Washington. Obviously all the major nations have energy and resource needs and interests that intersect and conflict, but there is little reason to think that these and other foreseeable problems are not negotiable. Warmongering speculation of the kind one sometimes hears when American conservatives discuss China or Russia— not to speak of Iran—is a product of world-hegemonic thinking, and a disservice to true American interests.»
Voici maintenant les quelques paragraphes que Pfaff présente en conclusion de son essai.
«History does not offer nations permanent security, and when it seems to offer hegemonic domination this usually is only to take it away again, often in unpleasant ways. The United States was fortunate to enjoy relative isolation for as long as it did. The conviction of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the country was exempt from the common fate has been succeeded in the twenty-first century by an American determination to fight (to “victory,” as the President insists) against the conditions of existence history now actually does offer. It sets against them the consoling illusion that power will always prevail, despite the evidence that this is not true.
»[Joseph] Schumpeter remarked in 1919 that imperialism necessarily carries the implication of an aggressiveness, the true reasons for which do not lie in the aims which are temporarily being pursued...an aggressiveness for its own sake, as reflected in such terms as “hegemony,” “world dominion,” and so forth...expansion for the sake of expanding...
»“This determination,” he continues, cannot be explained by any of the pretexts that bring it into action, by any of the aims for which it seems to be struggling at the time.... Such expansion is in a sense its own “object.”[12]
»Perhaps this has come to apply in the American case, and we have gone beyond the belief in national exception to make an ideology of progress and universal leadership into our moral justification for a policy of simple power expansion. In that case we have entered into a logic of history that in the past has invariably ended in tragedy.»
Le titre de l’essai de Pfaff est : «Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America.» Au regard des développements que nous connaissons, c’est un titre ambigu, — et peut-être l’est-il délibérément. Il renvoie aussi bien à cette conception de la destinée manifeste de l’Amérique apparue dans les années 1840 qu’au climat qui a prévalu dans les milieux de l’administration GW Bush et de ses inspirateurs. Cette ambiguïté est aussi bien la marque d’une continuité historique que d’un avatar de l’Histoire qui pourrait également, — et à notre sens plus justement, — être identifié comme une continuité de la psychologie américaniste. L’idée de “destinée manifeste” est présente aussi bien en 1847, quand le conflit contre le Mexique est lancé, qu’aujourd’hui, après six années de présidence Bush ; et il s’agit bien d’une “idée”, d’un concept à la fois défini par la passion et par certaines attitudes intellectuelles entières et posées comme autant de prémisses par définition indiscutables.
Cette équivalence entre l’histoire et la psychologie est, à notre sens, la clef de l’aventure américaniste. La politique extérieure des USA dépend de conceptions, d’idées, de perceptions psychologiques qui sont d’abord des attitudes conceptuelles sans réel rapport avec l’expérience historique. Pfaff fait justement une grande place au président Woodrow Wilson (la politique bushiste, celle des néo-conservateurs, n’est rien d’autre qu’un “néo-wilsonisme”). Il décrit cet homme, — en empruntant la plume d’un diplomate britannique, — en termes psychologiques intimes, voire pathologiques (nous soulignons le terme important à notre sens) : «A witness to the Versailles negotiations, the British diplomat Harold Nicolson, considered Wilson a man “obsessed, possessed...by the conviction that the League [of Nations] covenant was his own revelation and the solution of all human difficulties.”»
Lorsqu’il décrit le fondement de la politique extérieure US dans cette grande période, peut-être celle de sa plus grande “victoire”, celle de la Guerre froide, — le même mot (souligné par nous) revient sous la plume, psychologie d’une politique en accord avec la psychologie d’un homme, même si les époques semblent différer à cause de leurs spécificités différentes. «In the late 1950s, a colleague, the late Edmund Stillman, and I circulated an argument that eventually became a magazine article and book, suggesting that the American obsession with Soviet Communist power was turning the United States toward an American version of Marxist historicism and ideological messianism.»
On comprend bien que nous ne sommes pas dans le domaine de la grande vision, de l’intuition inspirée, là où les événements du monde rencontrent la transcendance pour créer l’Histoire. Il s’agit de psychologie, et d’une psychologie dont il est fondé de penser qu’elle est déformée ; par conséquent il s’agit des tourments de l’être exacerbés en pathologie. La soi-disant foi qui tente de donner à ces agitations l’apparence d’un élan spirituel relève plus souvent de la croyance sommaire, voire de la superstition pure et simple.
Si l’on en juge dans un cadre où l’on se promet de tenir compte des réalités de l’Histoire plus que des phantasmes de la psychologie, il est difficile et il serait déloyal d’être optimiste. Le déclin de leur puissance ne permet plus aux USA d’imposer les phantasmes de leur psychologie à l’Histoire et ils doivent désormais se soumettre à la loi de l’Histoire. Le terme de “tragedy” pour décrire le terme de l’aventure est approprié.
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