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2 août 2003 — Ces dernières semaines, trois points importants sont successivement apparus :
• L’après-guerre irakien est un très grave revers pour la politique expansionniste US ;
• Ce revers touche la position politique et personnelle de GW Bush, jusqu’à des points précis pouvant le mettre en cause personnellement (la question des manipulations des “preuves” contre l’Irak) ;
• Cet ensemble de faits a commencé à produire de très sérieux effets sur la position politique de GW Bush (position personnelle dans les sondages en baisse de façon désormais structurelle).
Ces constats qui s’enchaînent et impliquent une logique politique en marche font désormais envisager de façon très concrète que GW soit battu en 2004. Cette idée était politiquement impensable il y a un an, six mois, et même trois mois. Le retournement est complet, l’événement est important.
La question fondamentale qui se pose est celle-ci : GW battu par un candidat démocrate qui apparaîtrait évidemment comme un critique de sa politique de sécurité nationale, va-t-on vers un changement de cette politique et un retour en arrière, — disons pour illustrer de manière concrète ce propos, un retour vers le multilatéralisme ? Nous avons, quant à nous, une réponse négative sur le fond, dont on peut lire l’explication par ailleurs sur ce site, dans la rubrique “de defensa”.
La question de la possibilité pratique d’un tel “retour en arrière” n’est pas moins intéressante. Elle s’exprimerait comme ceci : si l’adversaire démocrate de GW le bat après avoir annoncé qu’il changera de politique, pourra-t-il effectivement la changer ? Cette question est intéressante parce que l’appareil américaniste est d’une telle lourdeur et il exerce une telle influence qu’on peut croire à la difficulté d’une part de le faire changer d’orientation, d’autre part de convaincre les autres qu’il a changé d’orientation.
Nous publions ci-après un texte d’analyse publié sur le site PINR, en date du 30 juillet 2003. La question analysée est encore plus précise, donc l’analyse plus convaincante. Elle porte sur le fait de savoir si la “doctrine Bush” d’attaque préventive, qui fonde sa politique de sécurité nationale, peut être abandonnée et remplacée par son contraire. La réponse est négative.
Il est assuré que cette question d’une alternative anti-GW à l’occasion des présidentielles de 2004 va devenir essentielle dans les mois qui viennent.
Drafted by Matthew Riemer, July 30, 2003, PINR
The forthcoming 2004 U.S. presidential election will be of great significance to the course of geopolitics over the next decade. If George W. Bush were to lose the election, the incoming president would inherit his administration's foreign policy trajectory. Such a political handoff would be far more dramatic than typically found when presidents leave office, as the Bush administration has articulated, and set in to motion, a new proactive foreign policy and U.S. military role, carrying out some of its actions in the face of widespread protest.
The terrorist attacks of September 11th helped create an environment in which the Bush administration's foreign policy initiatives at once seemed not only less radical but could also be more openly and actively pursued. In short, September 11th gave greater currency to the theories of the hawks of the world.
In September 2002, one year after the attacks, the Bush administration set forth its new foreign policy and security vision in its ambitious National Security Strategy, which advocates a more unilateralist — yet potentially still cooperative and respectful of international bodies — platform that has as its chief concern the eradication of terrorism:
“Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. We will build defenses against ballistic missiles and other means of delivery. We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies' efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies' plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.”
Additionally, the importance of economic freedom is stressed: “Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty — so the United States will work with individual nations, entire regions, and the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grows in prosperity.”
Free market capitalism is placed alongside abstract nouns such as “freedom” in other statements like this: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom — and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”
Trajectory
The U.S. has now gone to war twice in the past two years — in Afghanistan and Iraq — and created momentum in an international conflict that goes much deeper than America's fledgling “war on terrorism.” A new militarily competitive international environment has been created and volatile regions are becoming open to speculation by the great powers again.
Afghanistan — most acutely — and wide swaths of Central Asia are in a state of perpetual stagnation in terms of social, political, or even economic development. Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist regime have been overthrown in nearby Iraq, and now that country is in limbo until an authentic, non-American dictated representative government provides some
form of baseline security and stability for Iraqi society at large.
While military conflicts in Iran and Syria are realistically over for the foreseeable horizon and risk never rising due to the possible passing of the Bush administration and because recent reports indicate that the Syria and Iran threats may also be overstated, the Bush administration's rhetoric has given the international community the not all together unsurprising notion that the United States may strike any country at any time who denies its
will.
This has quite predictably led to an instinctive increase in nationalism and unilateralism in other country's approaches to the foreign policy arena. Countries are more concerned with actively securing, if not increasing, their interests abroad than ever before.
Central Asia is, again, a good example. The region, beginning first really with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but now being exacerbated by Washington's reaction to September 11th, has now become a new playing field for competing powers, from Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan to Iran, Russia, and China.
The U.S. has established a military footprint in the region for the first time in history. The fact that the U.S. freely moves about large tracts of land that were once some of the economically key areas of the Soviet Union speaks volumes of the weakened state in which Russia finds itself and how Washington has emphasized that trend by conspicuously projecting itself into
the heart of Asia.
But the significance of this policy set in motion by the Bush administration is the ideological vision it takes to maintain such principles — there's no secret that many in Washington, even within Bush's own party, vigorously disagree with his foreign policy.
In a spectrum of U.S. administrations, the Bush administration can be generally spoken of as leaning towards (and documenting its policy of in some cases) unilateralism: “We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.”
A widely held belief, and perhaps one even understandable to some admirers of the Bush administration, is that the administration as a whole — except possibly Colin Powell — is lacking in diplomatic finesse: essentially that Bush officials come off as arrogant and dismissive of those who challenge them.
This perception, regardless how deserving one feels it to be, affects how the world views the United States and its foreign policy and has led to an increase in anti-Americanism: a very real problem whenever Washington needs to sell something to the world.
The geopolitical environment is now beginning to mold itself to Bush administration doctrine. Countries are beginning to exhibit, like the Bush administration, more proactive, unilateralist, and protective foreign and security policies. Such feelings are furthered when rhetoric like the
following is heard coming from the White House: “It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge.”
Inheritance
What an incoming U.S. administration chooses to do with its inheritance will be of the greatest interest to foreign leaders. The world will be watching to see if it continues the Bush Doctrine of unilateralism and militarism or one of rejuvenating international bodies and working to resolve conflicts of a humanitarian nature around the world: the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Kashmir and Jammu, Chechnya, Aceh in Indonesia, Colombia, and others.
The most unnerving reality facing a new U.S. administration may be the fact that it could be too late to rollback the Bush administration's aggressive policy because now other countries are emulating that policy. How could a new administration withdraw from Central Asia knowing that locals who reject the U.S. presence would construe it as victory and that other regional powers, most notably Russia and China, would attempt to increase their military and economic influence there? How could an administration withdraw from Iraq with dozens of U.S. companies already having contracts valued in the billions of dollars? Most ominously, how could a new administration leave so many power vacuums around the globe?
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
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