L’impuissance d’être sage de l’américanisme

Nombreux sont les esprits avisés, en ce début d’année aux USA, qui examinent avec les plus vives inquiétudes le destin de leur pays. On a vu, par exemple, le cas de William Pfaff. Voici celui de Gabriel Kolko, dans un texte que publie LewRockwell.com le 1er février. Kolko s’attache à son thème favori, la dimension belliciste, cette sorte de “besoin de guerre” du système, — d’où son titre : «The Age of Perpetual Conflict.»

Mais, après tout, l’Amérique n’est certes pas la première puissance à montrer cette folie de la guerre? Sans doute, les exemples sont nombreux. Mais ce que Kolko met en évidence, c’est son incapacité d’apprendre, notamment de ses erreurs et de ses échecs, — c’est-à-dire, si l’on veut, son impuissance à devenir sage, à acquérir ce qu’on nomme la “sagesse”. Fort heureusement pour la fécondité du propos, Kolko nous renvoie ainsi à la psychologie américaniste. En cela, effectivement, l’Amérique est “exceptionnelle”. Il n’est pas assuré, comme on le comprend vite, qu’on doive l’envier.

Voici un passage où est exprimée cette idée :

«At the beginning of the 21st century only the U.S. has the will to maintain a global foreign policy and to intervene everywhere it believes necessary. Today and in the near future, America will make the decisions that will lead to war or peace, and the fate of much of the world is largely in its hands. It thinks it possesses the arms and a spectrum of military strategies all predicated on a triumphant activist role for itself. It believes that its economy can afford interventionism, and that the American public will support whatever actions necessary to set the affairs of some country or region on the political path it deems essential. This grandiose ambition is bipartisan and, details notwithstanding, both parties have always shared a consensus on it.

»The obsession with power and the conviction that armies can produce the political outcome a nation’s leaders desire is by no means an exclusively American illusion. It is a notion that goes back many centuries and has produced the main wars of modern times. The rule of force has been with mankind a very long time, and the assumptions behind it have plagued its history for centuries. But unlike the leaders of most European nations or Japan, the United States’ leaders have not gained insight from the calamities that have so seared modern history. Folly is scarcely an American monopoly, but resistance to learning when grave errors have been committed is almost proportionate to the resources available to repeat them. The Germans learned their lesson after two defeats, the Japanese after World War Two, and both nations found wars too exhausting and politically dangerous. America still believes that if firepower fails to master a situation the solution is to use it more precisely and much more of it. In this regard it is exceptional – past failures have not made it any wiser.»

Mis en ligne le 2 février 2007 à 09H24