Diplomacy & Crisis News

Depuis deux ans, la diffusion du Monde diplomatique s'est nettement redressée (1) ; le nombre de ses abonnés atteint un record historique ; la situation de ses finances n'inspire plus d'inquiétude. Un tel rétablissement détonne dans le paysage de la presse et dans le climat idéologique actuel. Il tranche en particulier avec le délabrement éditorial et économique de la plupart des périodiques, dont certains ne diffèrent leur trépas qu'en se transformant en prime numérique du géant des télécoms qui les possède (2).

Notre santé contraste également avec la situation politique et idéologique générale. Politique : le courant intellectuel — rationnel, démocratique, universaliste — qui inspire ce journal depuis sa naissance est provisoirement sur la défensive, affaibli par une absence de stratégie à long terme, des rivalités internes, le vrombissement ininterrompu des ego et des réseaux sociaux. Idéologique : les attentats djihadistes et la peur qu'ils inspirent relèguent au second plan les combats pour la justice sociale. Et encouragent à piétiner ce qui reste de libertés publiques, à accepter un état d'exception généralisé, à acclimater les esprits à l'idée d'une guerre civile.

Loin d'être l'apanage de l'extrême droite et de sites Internet paranoïaques, de tels desseins ont désormais table ouverte à la radio, à la télévision, dans les principaux titres de la presse. Ils concourent aux décisions d'un nombre croissant de responsables politiques. En juin dernier, l'éditorialiste du Point assimilait la Confédération générale du travail (CGT) à l'Organisation de l'État islamique. Avec le même souci de la comparaison intelligente et apaisée, l'ancien ministre Luc Ferry vient d'estimer, dans sa chronique hebdomadaire du Figaro, que le port du burkini vise à l'« islamisation de nos sociétés » et qu'il faut par conséquent « résister aux collabos de l'islamo-gauchisme », à leur « pacifisme munichois ».

Mobilisé à son tour par cette immense affaire estivale, l'éditorialiste socialiste Jacques Julliard ne décolère plus, tantôt dans Marianne, tantôt dans Le Figaro, contre « le parti collabo du “pas d'amalgame” à tous crins, du “vivre ensemble” à tout prix ». Et il vilipende le « parti de la France coupable » qui « lui tire dans le dos quand elle est attaquée de face ». En juin 1940, Winston Churchill avait alerté ses compatriotes du danger d'un débarquement des armées nazies sur les côtes britanniques (« We shall fight on the beaches ») ; d'aucuns n'hésitent plus à transposer ce morceau de bravoure historique dans le combat, prétendument féministe mais assurément moins risqué, contre des tenues de bain religieuses : « Eh bien, nous aussi, nous nous battrons sur les plages (3) »... Dans un tout autre domaine, celui de l'économie politique, même la critique argumentée des politiques néolibérales passe de nos jours pour une forme de « négationnisme ».

Contre ce nouveau maccarthysme, nous continuerons à privilégier engagement et raison. Nous ne demeurerons pas pour autant cantonnés dans des positions défensives. Au fil des mois, ce journal est redevenu le lieu de rassemblement d'un nombre croissant de lecteurs souvent actifs dans les mobilisations sociales. Notre souci de rendre compte des transformations rapides de l'ordre international, alors que l'attention est trop souvent happée par des événements sans portée, explique aussi ce regain d'influence. Joue également en notre faveur le fait que nous disposons d'une colonne vertébrale, de convictions anciennes et solides. Et que notre journalisme, loin de juxtaposer des commentaires indignés, s'adosse à des enquêtes exigeantes, ouvertes sur le monde. Chacun sait par ailleurs que nous n'appartenons à aucune chapelle, que les auteurs les plus divers collaborent à nos publications, qu'aucune banque, aucun industriel ne nous tient.

Depuis 2009, nous avons fait appel à vous pour mener ce combat éditorial et politique. Le résultat est là, puisque notre vigueur découle de votre appui. La période qui s'annonce réclamera plus que jamais que notre voix porte. Votre contribution aura donc également pour avantage de prévenir tous les dynamiteurs du bien commun que leur offensive nous trouvera sur leur chemin.

(1) Depuis 2014, notre diffusion moyenne est passée de 137 000 à 156 000 exemplaires. Nous détaillerons notre situation et nos comptes d'ici à la fin de l'année.

(2) Lire Serge Halimi et Pierre Rimbert, « Information sous contrôle », Le Monde diplomatique, juillet 2016, et Marie Bénilde, « Quand les tuyaux avalent les journaux », Le Monde diplomatique, septembre 2016.

(3) Élisabeth Lévy, Le Figaro.fr, 11 septembre 2016.

Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro d’automne de Politique étrangère (n°3/2016). Tristan Aureau propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Ian Bremmer, Superpower – Three Choices for America’s Role in the World (Londres, Penguin Press, 2015, 240 pages).

Alors qu’approchent les prochaines élections présidentielles américaines, nombreux sont les ouvrages qui entendent dresser un bilan de la politique étrangère américaine de ces dernières années et dégager quelques orientations d’avenir. L’originalité du livre de Ian Bremmer, essayiste influent et président de l’Eurasia Group, tient non pas tant à une thèse singulière qu’à la volonté de l’auteur de faire prendre parti au lecteur.

Dès l’introduction, le lecteur est ainsi invité à répondre à un questionnaire portant sur les options fondamentales de la politique étrangère américaine. S’ensuit une présentation synthétique du contexte international ; sans surprise, l’accent est mis par Bremmer sur les incertitudes entourant l’émergence de la Chine, le regain d’agressivité de la Russie, la faiblesse stratégique de l’Union européenne et les violentes secousses qui traversent le Moyen-Orient. Puis vient une critique sans concession de la politique étrangère menée depuis la fin de la guerre froide, particulièrement par Barack Obama dont Bremmer ne cesse de déplorer ce qu’il qualifie d’absence de stratégie.

S’ouvre alors le cœur de l’ouvrage, avec trois chapitres correspondant, pour Bremmer, à autant de cours possibles pour la future politique américaine. Le premier – Indispensable America – repose sur la conviction que les États-Unis demeurent une nation exceptionnelle appelée à imposer son leadership sur la scène internationale et à promouvoir ses valeurs, le cas échéant en recourant à la force armée. Le deuxième – Moneyball America – serait une politique étrangère calculatrice, fondée sur la poursuite des intérêts américains et débarrassée de toute prétention à exporter des valeurs telles que la démocratie ou les droits de l’homme. Le troisième – Independent America – renvoie à l’idée que les États-Unis ne pourront restaurer un quelconque leadership sur la scène internationale sans redevenir un exemple, ce qui suppose de reconstruire la puissance américaine de l’intérieur avant s’aventurer à nouveau au-dehors.

Le principal mérite de l’ouvrage tient à ce que Bremmer défend vivement chacun de ces trois points de vue, avant de dire sa préférence pour l’option Independent America, au terme d’une analyse sans concession, notamment à propos de la politique de Barack Obama face aux crises syrienne et ukrainienne. La présentation des options a enfin le mérite de structurer le débat de politique étrangère qui pourrait prendre de l’ampleur à l’approche des élections de novembre prochain.

Le lecteur peut toutefois regretter que le propos soit, en définitive, convenu, et reprenne des thèses défendues par d’autres auteurs ces dernières années. L’option Independent America rappelle la thèse défendue par R. Haas dans Foreign Policy Begins at Home (Basic Books, 2014), tandis que l’analyse de la moindre puissance relative des États-Unis fait directement écho aux analyses de J. Nye, notamment dans son dernier essai (Is the American Century Over?, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2015). Quant à la critique de la politique d’Obama, elle peine à convaincre tant elle écarte d’un revers de main des orientations fondamentales qui, à défaut d’une stratégie formalisée, ne manquent pas de cohérence : « pivot » vers l’Asie, recours accru à des modes d’intervention discrets, retrait des principaux théâtres d’opérations sur lesquels s’était engagé son prédécesseur.

Tristan Aureau

S’abonner à Politique étrangère.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other senior UN officials have paid tribute to Shimon Peres, former Israeli President and the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who passed away early Wednesday at the age of 93.

Officials at the United Nations today urged human and animal health authorities around the world to step up and more effectively address rabies &#8211 a preventable but fatal disease that still claims the lives of an estimated 60,000 people each year &#8211 as the international community marks World Rabies Day.

At interactive dialogues on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Libya Ukraine, and Burundi, senior UN human rights officials and independent experts today urged the governments to take immediate steps to ensure protection of human rights in their respective countries.

Noting the obstacles that persons with disabilities or those with other access requirements face in taking advantage of fundamental aspects of travel, senior United Nations officials today urged policy-makers, travel planners and companies that work with persons with disabilities to work together to make travel more accessible.

Four United Nations human rights experts today urged authorities in Pakistan to halt the execution of Imdad Ali, a man with a psychosocial disability, and to re-try him in compliance with international standards.

Warning that unsafe abortions kill nearly 50,000 women each year, United Nations human rights experts today called on States across the world to repeal restrictive abortion laws and policies, and all punitive measures and discriminatory barriers to access safe reproductive health services.

A new delay in Somalia’s elections is a matter of “immediate concern,” raising fears that the process is being politically manipulated and that the latest postponement may only be one of yet further rolling delays, the top United Nations official in the long-troubled East African country warned today.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today cautioned that unless it receives $3 million in urgent funding, it will have to suspend its school meals programme in Mali, affecting nearly 180,000 children in about 1,000 schools.

Having survived through the Greek saga with the Euro still intact, the banks, for now, still standing, and a new capital markets union in the offing, it could be argued that Europe’s economic union has withstood the slings and arrows of misfortune that have come its way in the last few years. The same, however, cannot be said of its political union.

In his State of the Union address delivered to the European Parliament, Commission President, Jean Claude Juncker, went so far as to call it an “existential crisis”. The day before making this statement, two headlines came out that supported his diagnosis. The first concerned the revelation that the EU admitted Romania and Bulgaria despite warnings from The European Court of Auditors (ECA) that they were not yet ready. The second involved comments made by Juncker’s compatriot, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn who said that Hungary should be excluded “temporarily or if need be forever” from the EU on account of the government’s authoritarian lurch and rough handling of the refugee crisis.

Looking more deeply at these interconnected issues we cannot help but agree with Juncker’s gloomy assessment about Europe being in a state of crisis. Since 2008, the main criticism of the EU has been that as a monetary, but not fiscal, union it has been incapable of correcting the imbalances that resulted from the differing economic needs of core and periphery members. Much has been made of this policy mismatch and the deleterious effect it can have, especially on the periphery.

The attention given to this divergence in economic priorities is understandable given that it cuts to the core of the Euro crises; however, while all eyes have been trained on the economic situation, insufficient attention has been paid to a divergence of another, possibly more threatening, kind that has been opening up among member states on the political level.

While the founding members, having set a course for “ever closer union” went into autopilot, expecting to arrive at a state of near perfect union sometime in the medium term, they never imagined that the idea of a perfect union in Berlin might be very different from that in Sofia, Prague or Budapest. That status quo lasted until the onset of the refugee crisis, which revealed the extent of the ideological parting of ways between old and new Europe.

Bulgaria was hard hit by the waves of refugees making their way into Europe, a crisis that translated into violence against asylum seekers committed with impunity by border guards. The country erected a 230-kilometer fence on its border with Turkey and has deployed the army to patrol it, which was accompanied by a spike in the number of reports of excessive force. This happens in a country whose European values are under scrutiny for other reasons, such as its shaky commitment to the rule of law and the nefarious influence the Mafia has over the state.

Across the border, Romania shows the same signs of hostility to refugees despite barely having any asylum seekers crossing its borders. Nevertheless, Bucharest loudly rejected the European Union’s quotas mandatory quotas, arguing that taking in 6,000 would be too much to handle. And indeed, Romania seems to have troubles even keeping its current population within its borders. Millions of Romanians have already left the country over the past decade for economic reasons. The current caretaker government of Dacian Ciolos has been accused of standing idly by as the health care system (understaffed by at least 30,000 physicians) crumbled, and has proved incapable of handling massive strikes and walk-outs. To top it off, Ciolos is accused of leading a witch-hunt against political opponents as part of a wide anti-corruption drive with the help of the Romanian Intelligence Service.

Romania’s case is however typical of the political climate prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe. The  Visegrad group (composed of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) has emerged as a stalwart bastion countering western values of liberalism, tolerance and open borders with its own set of values: Christian, nativist, authoritarian.

The most headline grabbing of these countries’ leaders is perhaps Viktor Orbán whose opposition to the EU quota system for distributing refugees throughout the block has become a rallying cry with which to drown out the criticism of corruption and cronyism that plague his administration. Claiming that the admission of Muslim refugees into Europe would undermine its Christian identity, Orbán has successfully fanned the flames of xenophobia in Hungary to a level grossly disproportionate to the vanishingly small number who would actually be settled in the country under the proposed quota system. A forthcoming referendum on migration is expected to swing largely in favor of the government and be used by Orban as a stick against further pressure from Brussels.

Poland, equally concerned with the preservation of its Christian identity, if not its democratic institutions, has come under fire from Brussels for undermining the ability of the supreme court to review legislation, leading to accusations of a power grab on behalf of the government and a roll back towards soviet style centralization. A clash between protesters and the government over the introduction of highly restrictive abortion laws and the influence of the Catholic Church on policy speaks to the growing rift between the country’s urban youth and the staunchly conservative Law and Justice Party.

It is strange how the newest members of the European Union, who have benefited both financially and politically from being members of a powerful political bloc, have been the first to jump ship at the first sign of trouble. Since its creation the EU has been driven by a set of common principles that it was thought would always define the Union. The refugee crisis has woken “old” Europe up to the realization that in a union of 28 countries those principles may not be so common anymore.

The post Central and Eastern Europe at odds with Brussels appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

A B-2 in formation flight with eight U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets

Recently, the case has been made for “preserving” U.S. primacy using primarily military means. With respect to de Gaulle’s “The sword is the axis of the world” thinking, this stance fails to recognize that economic power is the foundation of a state’s influence in the 21st century.  Even more fundamentally, it fails to take into account both great and minor powers’ pursuit of self-interest, both historically and in today’s multi-polar world.

Militaristic Romanticism Will Continue to Bankrupt the U.S.

Conventional wisdom has it that the U.S. assumed primacy in the post-modern world after defeating the Former Soviet Union. Yes, the U.S. was able to weaken the Former Soviet Union militarily through supporting proxy fighters in Afghanistan, and economically through having it overspend on defense in a futile effort to overcome SDI (“Star Wars”). However, what is not in dispute is that there was no direct military conflict between the two powers. Had that happened, the odds are great that not only would I not be here typing this article, but you also wouldn’t be here reading it.

The conclusion reached during the Cold War that a direct military conflict between the superpowers would have been detrimental to all of humanity seems to have been forgotten by some when discussing current U.S-China hostilities. War with China is just as equally untenable nowadays as military conflict with the Former Soviet Union was during the Cold War. Actually, it’s even more untenable as China is not only a nuclear power, but is increasingly the epicenter of today’s interconnected global economy.  The economic fallout from any shooting war with China would not leave any nation on Earth, including, but especially the U.S., unscathed.

Because of all of this, it is critical for the U.S. to draw several conclusions. First, it’s going to need to effectively separate economics from politics in its dealing with states, especially China. While the phrase “Hot Economics, Cold Politics” may have once referred to Sino-Japanese relations, it can be broadened to refer to relations between all states in the 21st century, even if hot is a misnomer in the wake of the global economic crisis.

Pursuit of Self-interest is Man’s Natural State

Even more importantly, the U.S. needs to recognize that the world has returned to the era of great power politics, if it ever truly left it at all. To survive in this world, it will be increasingly critical to recognize, and not deny, the role of self-interest in all nations’ foreign policies, large and small. A first step in this process would be to go even further back in time before the Cold War and revisit certain WWII-era terminology, notably “ally”, “axis”, and “accommodation/appeasement”.

The word “ally” does not mean supplicant. Historically, allies have served one another’s foreign policy objectives because they understood how an alliance served their own self-interest and because they were ready to seal the agreement in blood if necessary, not because they necessarily liked one another. Only through combined U.S. and Soviet power was Nazi Germany eventually defeated. Even on the verge of imminent collapse, the Former Soviet Union contributed to the U.S.’ coalition in the Gulf War. Despite initial hiccups, is Russian cooperation in Syria today any less vital?

The term “axis” has been used rather carelessly recently as well. In the wake of Turkish overtures to Russia, a “Moscow-Ankara axis” has been mentioned. Following Russia’s warmer ties with Beijing and post-sanctions Iran, a “Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis” has been voiced. Lastly, in the wake of Russian power assertion in Syria and intelligence-sharing efforts with other powers in the region, a possible “Moscow-Tehran-Baghdad(-Damascus?) axis” has been written on. It’s quite moronic to continue to label other countries’ foreign policy goals with lexicon dating back almost three generations, as if a foreign policy that doesn’t clearly support the “rules-based order” is inherently evil.

Related to this are the term’s “accommodation” and “appeasement”. It is equally idiotic to use these terms when describing, for example, German and Japanese outreach efforts to Russia in the wake of U.S.-Russian hostilities. First, a state (ally or not) is always going to follow its own interests, especially where economics is concerned. Secondly,  the use of these terms to describe policies of former actual Axis powers reeks of historical amnesia.

Following this logic, is the U.K. an “ally”, part of an “axis”, or “appeasing” other powers? The U.K. recently withdrew from the EU and became a founding member of the AIIB, both despite U.S. protestations. The point is that if the U.S.’ strongest ally in its historically most-important geographic area of interest does this, it’s realistic to assume that this is a harbinger of a larger trend, and not just an outlier.

The issue is not whether it was actually in the U.K.’s interest to make these moves. Rather, the point is that the U.K. perceived that these actions were in its own self-interest and that it, along with all other states, will continue to make decisions based on this criteria, not dictation from other powers. This is also reflected in recent moves by both the Philippines and Vietnam to improve economic relations with China. These maneuvers, combined with global economic interdependency, are simultaneously a harbinger of the future and a reminder of the past and will continue to undermine any attempts to “preserve” U.S. primacy.

The post “Preserving” Primacy is Both Delusional and Self-destructive appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Short on details but long on criticism, Trump is put on the defensive in a test of his preparedness to be commander in chief.

World leaders gathered in New York City to give speeches and discuss the world’s most pressing foreign-policy issues, but they neglected two of its biggest problems.

Highly personalized leader regimes are coming to the forefront of political systems across the globe

If Hillary Clinton wants to win, she needs to confront the rise of fear-driven politics.

Investors around the world are nervous about the possibility of a Trump victory Monday night.

As Moscow’s massive “bunker buster” falls on civilians, Russia sends a new strike plane to back up the Syrian army

Despite calls for it to remain intact, FIFA has dismantled its anti-racism task force.

Kenya's plan to close the world's largest refugee camp involves illegal forced repatriations of Somalis. Why is the U.N. helping to carry it out?