Clin d’œil pour un coup de maître

Il nous faut vous signaler avec insistance un coup de maître, lui-même signalé par notre lecteur “nn” (le 8 janvier sur notre Forum) avec qui nous avons été parfois en désaccord, semble-t-il, – mais pour cette fois complètement d’accord… Il s’agit d’un article de “Spengler” (anonyme), sur Atimes.com le même 8 janvier.

Il nous est parfois arrivé de rencontrer “Spengler”, avec lequel, également, nous ne sommes pas toujours d’accord. Pour ce texte, par contre! Cet article fait, dans des termes cavaliers et impératifs, un survol de l’année 2007 aux USA, de l’année 2007 pour les USA, – l’annus horribilis par excellence, l’archétype de la catastrophe. La description générale est enlevée, impérative, très rythmée et convaincante.

«…The same mood of national narcissism brought about America's strategic reverses. The rest of the world, Washington reasons, need only be like us to live happily. Until the ghost of James Baker III possessed Washington a year ago, through the installation of Robert Gates as defense secretary, American policy was in the hands of the Sorcerer's Apprentices of the Reagan years. America had the magic formula of the 1980s, they reckoned, and all they only needed to sprinkle the Fairy Dust of democracy upon recalcitrant countries in order to make them fly.

«To prop up its failed Iraqi project until the November elections, Washington has made material concessions to Iran and Syria, its worst enemies. In return for restricting support for the Iraqi insurgencies they incubated from the beginning, Iran has a free pass to continue enriching uranium, and Syria has a free hand in Lebanon. America swore that it would never permit Iranian nuclear development, and that it would suppress the Iranian-Syrian puppet militia of Hezbollah in Lebanon. It has done neither.

»By endorsing the Islamists in Turkey as a force for democracy, Washington has earned the contempt of the Islamists, as well as the enmity of the secularists who feel betrayed. But nothing compares to America's humiliation in Pakistan. After sending the unfortunate Benazir Bhutto to her death as the instrument of American democracy, Washington has no choice but to cling all the harder to President Pervez Musharraf, who everyone from Hillary Clinton to the taxi driver who took me to the airport believes to be complicit in Bhutto's assassination.

»The global “war on terror” has given birth to Islamist monsters in Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq. The so-called color revolutions are stillborn. Lebanon's Cedar Revolution has none but homonymic virtues, as the US State Department will “cede her” to Syria. But the single most stupid and destructive act of American diplomacy in the past seven years has been the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, for it persuaded Putin never to trust the West under any circumstances, ever again.»

Toutes ces choses, ces diverses déroutes américanistes, “Spengler” les définit de cette façon qu'on ne peut trouver plus juste: «The Americans […] have met the enemy, and it is them.» Cette analyse remarquable de “Spengler” est balancée par une analyse de la politique de Poutine et un portrait du président russe. Ne s’embarrassant nullement de la pensée pleurnicharde et moraliste courante chez les commentateurs occidentaux et pour laquelle il semble avoir un salutaire mépris, “Spengler” ne tarit pas d’éloge pour Vladimir Poutine. L’on a rarement lu, et encore plus d’un commentateur anglo-saxon, une analyse aussi réaliste et pertinente, résumé par ce mot : «the most talented political leader of our time», – et magnifié par cette référence: «Working from a position of weakness, Russia's president is the closest the modern world comes to the insidious strategic genius of a Cardinal Richelieu.»

Conclusion de “Spengler”:

«Putin will finish his second term of office as Russian president early in 2008, just[ten months] when the next American president takes office. There is plenty of time to naturalize him as an American citizenand amend the constitution to permit a foreign-born president. The alternative is to elect another incarnation of the political type that got America into trouble in the first place.

»… That is the sort of strategic thinking America needs. So my endorsement for the next president of the United States goes to Vladimir Putin.

»One final note – Putin doesn't speak much English. But that shouldn't disqualify him. Neither does George W Bush.»

Mis en ligne le 9 janvier 2008 à 06H55