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23 novembre 2004 — La réélection de GW Bush a introduit, temporairement sans doute (avant un autre élément de la même sorte), un élément de confusion dans le jugement qu’on porte sur la situation de la crise du monde. Des facteurs comme la fausseté de l’idée d’une victoire décisive de Bush (avec 51% des votants) ou comme la possibilité d’une fraude massive dans le scrutin du 2 novembre sont à peine évoquées dans la presse nationale US, et pas du tout dans la presse européenne. On s’attache surtout à des “effets”, à des “images”, dont l’aspect conservateur et archaïque, — paradoxal dans la mesure où ce sont les milieux dits “avancés”, intellectuels et autres, qui les véhiculent, — est extrêmement frappant et certainement très significatif de l’état d’esprit de ceux qui favorisent ces phénomènes de communication.
Par exemple, ces milieux continuent à considérer l’affaire irakienne du seul point de vue de l’Irak (élimination de Saddam, situation dans le pays, etc), en plus en tombant dans tous les pièges du virtualisme américain qui décrit cette affaire à l’avantage du seul camp américain. Mais le véritable et le seul intérêt fondamental de cette crise est de nous donner une mesure de la puissance américaine. La cause en est simple : ce phénomène de la puissance américaine est le seul qui ait une importance telle qu’à lui seul il explique tout le reste dans la crise du monde. A cet égard, que les Etats-Unis aient envahi l’Irak n’a guère d’importance ; déjà, le Kosovo amorçait ce débat essentiel, et il se poursuivrait aussi bien aujourd’hui si c’était l’Iran ou la Corée du Nord qui était envahi par les USA, et non l’Irak. L’essentiel est que les USA aient soumis leur puissance, avec laquelle ils prétendent dominer le monde, au test de la réalité de ce monde.
Ainsi, dans la confusion de l’importance des choses, perdure l’idée de la puissance absolue des Etats-Unis, et cette confusion est telle que, souvent, la situation en Irak est avancée comme signe de cette toute-puissance. La “victoire” de Falloujah en a été l’occasion, avec l’ignorance complète et scandaleuse des conditions humanitaires épouvantables de cette opération, et de sa réelle signification stratégique. C’est pour cette raison, notamment, que nous favorisons ici certains commentateurs qui, au contraire de l’ignorance vaniteuse et de l’aveuglement satisfait de la société de communication, ont pris en compte la réalité de l’état de la puissance américaine tel que montré par la réalité. Et s’il est un des deux événements essentiels de ces 20 derniers mois (depuis avril 2003 et la “conquête” de l’Irak), c’est bien la mise en évidence des limites dramatiques de la puissance américaine. (L’autre élément essentiel est le développement exponentiel d’une réalité alternative, non seulement pour le public mais pour les dirigeants eux-mêmes : le virtualisme.)
C’est pour cette raison notamment, bis repetitat, que les commentaires du Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, du groupe PINR, nous semblent particulièrement précieux. Weinstein ne se contente pas, comme font certains, de mentionner épisodiquement le phénomène de la limite et même de l’affaiblissement dramatique de la puissance américaine sans répudier complètement l’ancien mode de pensée appuyé sur l’apriorisme de la puissance absolue de l’Amérique ; d’une façon décisive, il a intégré dans son analyse ce fait fondamental et l’a placé au centre de la logique qu’il développe.
Ci-dessous, Weinstein développe l’analyse de l’arrivée au département d’État de Condoleeza Rice.
By Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, PINR, 22 November 2004
The nomination of current National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state in the second Bush administration leaves the shape of U.S. foreign policy as uncertain as it has been since the problems encountered by the occupation of Iraq revealed the limits of Washington's military and diplomatic power. Of all the major players on the Bush security team, Rice has been the one with the least defined and consistent geostrategic approach. Although she is expected to be one of the President's most trusted and loyal advisers -- indeed, a confidante -- she was not the main policy shaper in the first administration, playing, for the most part, a supporting role for the neo-conservative protagonists. It is not clear that she has a vision of her own, nor should one conclude that she will fall easily into the neo-conservative camp.
Analysts agree that the Rice nomination signals an attempt by Bush to achieve a single foreign policy voice in his second administration and to eliminate conflicting perspectives that subvert the aim of staying ''on message.'' What that message is and will be, however, is open to question. At present, Washington is drifting toward greater isolation from the rest of the world and it is unlikely that Rice will reverse that tendency. Bush has announced that the grand design for foreign policy in his second administration is to continue the project of democratizing the greater Middle East, an idea that is central to neo-conservatism. Under present circumstances, that idea looks to be utopian, leaving a policy vacuum that is likely to be filled with ad hoc responses to the pressure of events initiated outside the U.S.
Conflicting Policy Tendencies
During the first Bush administration, neo-conservative, internationalist and realist tendencies of foreign and security policy contended for supremacy.
Represented by Vice President Dick Cheney and endorsed in practice by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the neo-conservatives proceeded on the premise that Washington was capable through its own military power and support from ''coalitions of the willing'' to remake the world into a system of market democracies in which the U.S. would function as protector and be the prime beneficiary. The neo-conservatives gained ascendancy after the September 11 attacks when they were able to meld their vision to the ''war on terror.'' The resistance that Washington has faced in its efforts to make Iraq a demonstration project of Middle Eastern democracy has cast doubts on the viability of the neo-conservative position, but its advocates remain in place in the Defense Department and the Vice President's office.
Even if the neo-conservatives remain in ascendancy, it is not clear that they will be able to pursue their designs in any meaningful way. Preemptive warfare -- the key element in neo-conservative strategy, whether as a threat or as a practice -- does not appear to be viable in the near or medium term. The failure of neo-conservative policy in Iraq, which showed the weakness of Washington's military hand, leaves neo-conservatives with the choice of abandoning their vision for a more multilateral approach (which is unlikely) or continuing to affirm their ideology rhetorically as they make short-term expedient adjustments to challenges to U.S. interests and power.
The ascendancy of the neo-conservatives meant the eclipse of traditional Republican internationalism, rooted in global business interests, particularly finance, and represented by outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell and much of the State Department bureaucracy. Favoring diplomacy over force and advocating a multilateral world order in which the U.S. would be primus inter pares, Powell reportedly opposed the Iraq intervention, but was able to do no more than convince Bush to go to the United Nations before embarking on the invasion.
With Powell's resignation, internationalism no longer has an advocate in the higher circles of power, making the prospect unlikely that Washington will attempt to rebuild U.S. power by shifting to a more multilateral course that would restore traditional alliances with European powers and seek cooperation with potential adversaries such as China and Russia. Had Powell or someone with his views been permitted to advocate multilateralism in the second Bush administration, Washington would have had more flexibility than it does now that internationalism has no voice.
Rice has been identified as the major exponent of the third foreign policy tendency in the first Bush administration, realism, although her present position is unclear. Realism here means the principle that international politics are determined by states using all their power resources to maximize the satisfaction of their interests. For Rice before 9/11, this meant that Washington should not be constrained by alliance structures or international organizations from acting unilaterally when it was in its interest to do so, which placed her closer to the neo-conservatives than to the internationalists. On the other hand, it also meant that Washington should refrain from nation building experiments and grand designs of world order, which distanced her from the neo-conservatives.
Realism was the foundation of the Republican foreign policy plank in the 2000 presidential campaign and was the operative tendency before 9/11. Washington's rejection of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, its refusal to join the International Criminal Court and its cancellation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia were consistent with Rice's brand of realism and with the neo-conservative tendency, creating the alliance that edged internationalism to the margins.
After 9/11, it has become difficult to determine where Rice stands. Some commentators report that she underwent a ''conversion'' to the neo-conservative view, whereas others maintain that she has remained a realist. What is clear is that Rice -- whatever her personal views -- joined the neo-conservative camp in practice and did not perform the mediating role between conflicting perspectives that is usually expected from the national security adviser. Some analysts speculate that she was simply not strong enough to stand up to the neo-conservatives; others say that she is primarily motivated by ambition and simply went over to the winning side. Or, perhaps, she did undergo a political conversion. Whatever the case, she did not advocate an independent position that might have tempered the neo-conservative tendency through forwarding reservations about nation building.
A Policy Void
The nomination of Rice to the office of secretary of state appears to plant the second Bush administration in the position of trying to pursue foreign and security policy through the inoperative neo-conservative paradigm. The President, who self-avowedly concentrates on the overall vision and not on its implementation, continues to accept the neo-conservative big picture, and there is nothing to indicate that Rice is willing or motivated to try to persuade him otherwise. Yet in the aftermath of the Iraq intervention, that vision is no longer credible, at least in its original optimistic form. It is not possible to implement a design that has turned out to be utopian, which means that Washington faces a policy void.
If Bush and the neo-conservatives are true to their words, Washington will be occupied during the next four years in trying to democratize the Middle East, which means that it will be bogged down in Iraq and diverted from responding adequately to challenges elsewhere in the world. At State, Rice will be constrained by the neo-conservative project from exercising creative diplomacy, which demands resources and the President's ''political capital.'' The stage is set for an ad hoc foreign policy unless there is some unforeseeable paradigm shift. Absent the internationalist tendency, ad hoc adjustments will tend in the direction of Washington's isolation from other great and regional powers, which will progressively gain advantage at the expense of the U.S.
An example of the drift toward isolation is the endorsement on November 16 by the International Atomic Energy Agency of the agreement between Iran and a combine of Britain, France and Germany that Tehran would temporarily suspend its uranium enrichment program while it negotiates an incentives package with the Europeans. Washington had hoped to refer Iran's nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council, where sanctions against Tehran could be imposed, but that option now seems to be dead.
The neo-conservative design for Iran is to pressure Tehran punitively and eventually to create the conditions for regime change from within by a discontented population. Neither the Europeans nor Russia nor China has any interest in the neo-conservative plan, and they have effectively blocked it. By joining the Franco-German combine, Britain has signaled its independence from the United States; the prospects for future ''coalitions of the willing'' are dim, and, in the case of Iran, Washington has effectively ceded initiative to other powers. This is a pattern that is likely to be repeated around the world: Washington will take the same line that it has for the last four years, but there will be little cooperation and other powers will pursue their own perceived independent interests.
Conclusion
The possibility that Washington will act to resist the drift toward multipolarity in world politics and toward its own isolation has grown dim with the Rice nomination and the appointment of her deputy, Stephen Hadley, to the post of national security adviser. Those who believe that neo-conservative triumphalism will generate new interventions probably have misplaced fears. It is far more likely that -- stripped of the viability of its vision -- the dominant neo-conservative tendency will be paralyzed, hastening the erosion of U.S. power worldwide and providing many opportunities for rising powers to test their mettle.
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