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Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin in happier times, during a G-8 meeting in Ireland in 2013. (Photo: Pete Souza)

On June 23, the Washington Post published an article online about the Obama administration’s deliberations concerning Russia’s hacking of the U.S. electoral process last year. The article, which was fairly balanced, has yielded a considerable amount of discussion, much of which has been far less balanced.

A Rant (Please excuse me for a moment.)

Have you ever noticed how, after a decision is made, after the implementation is complete, after the consequences are in, everyone—and by everyone I especially mean TV pundits—is suddenly an expert on whatever question was involved. In fact, everyone suddenly has been an expert from the beginning. And they pretty much know the same things. They know the decision was wrong; they know the outcome was a disaster; and they know that if only the decision maker had gone with the other option—whatever that option might have been (and it is unlikely to be specified)—then everything would have worked out well. There would, in fact, have been no adverse consequences whatsoever, for there can only ever be two options, and obviously one of them must have been the perfect solution to the problem at hand.

Just imagine this scenario: Let’s say that George W. Bush decided at the last minute not to invade Iraq in 2003. To this very day, Dick Cheney would be going around saying, “If only we had taken out Saddam Hussein when we had the chance, they would have greeted us with flowers and the Middle East would be a beacon of peace, stability, and prosperity today.” And pretty much all of the pundits would believe him.

Now, Back to Our Story

The key take-away from the pundit discussion regarding Obama and the Russian cyber attacks is that Obama did nothing in the face of Russian aggression. The critics rarely if ever say what he should have done;* often neglect to mention what he did do; and completely ignore the reasons for not doing more. President Trump, seeing an opportunity to fault his predecessor, has picked up this theme and promoted it, blaming any ill consequences of Russian hacking on Obama’s lack of response while continuing to deny that the hacking occurred at all.**

With regard to timing, critics complain that the administration did not make a public announcement of the Russian hacking until early October when CIA director John Brennan had attributed the hacking to Russia in early August. This, however, disregards the fact that the rest of the Intelligence Community did not conclude that Brennan was right until . . . late September. (People often assume that the government knows something from the moment that one official believes it to be true, but government—or any collective decision-making process—does not work that way, which actually prevents a lot of irresponsible decisions.)

The complaint also tacitly dismisses the potential importance of Obama’s (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to bring the Republicans into a joint statement in defense of the America electoral system. (He wanted to avoid any appearance that he was interfering in the election himself, especially considering that Trump—and Bernie Sanders—had already denounced the process as rigged.) Critics do not give any explanation for why the announcement would have made a bigger impact in August. (If people really believed that to be the case, then “August surprise” would be a perennial political cliché instead of “October surprise.”) In the end, the announcement received virtually no attention because Trump’s Access Hollywood video and the first dump of John Podesta’s personal emails were released the same day, and the press found them more intriguing, but the administration could hardly have anticipated that.

As usual, Obama’s approach was cautious and deliberative as he focused on ways to deal with the situation without making matters worse. Worse, in this case, would have meant direct interference in the voting or vote-counting process. Thus the task at hand was to avoid the Scylla of allowing the Russians to interfere with impunity while evading the Charybdis of provoking them into escalating. You don’t want to taunt them into some action that you cannot defend against. Also to be avoided was any action or announcement that could undermine the voters’ faith in the integrity of the election and thus further the Russians’ purpose of sowing confusion and distrust. Would the Russians really have escalated? There was no way to know then, and there is no way to know now. Some people have pointed out that the voting and tabulation processes are not connected to the Internet and are therefore safe from outside interference. That is a valid point; yet the computers that controlled the centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear fuel enrichment plant were not connected to the Internet either, and the United States found that it could get the Stuxnet worm into them if it really wanted to.

So, just what did Obama do? In addition to public announcements that we knew what Moscow was up to, private warnings not to go further, bolstering of the election infrastructure against cyber threats, and postelection diplomatic and economic sanctions, Obama had an additional trick up his sleeve. This is what the Post called “a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia’s infrastructure.” This is something the Russians were intended to find and presumably would be unable to counteract. The idea is to warn them that, if they should interfere in an election again (or engage in some other unacceptable aggressive action), the United States will already be in a position to disrupt Russia’s most vital infrastructures. If the Post has described the situation accurately (and if Trump does not order it removed, which he apparently has not done to date), this may be just the deterrent threat needed to avoid a return of Russia’s electoral interference. In a few years, we shall see.

*Some specify that Obama should have imposed December’s sanctions before the election (and simply assume that this would have elicited neither adverse reactions from the Trump campaign and Republican voters nor escalation by the Russians). In cases such as these, doing what I recommend but not doing it the moment I recommend it (or when I determine after the fact that I would have recommended it if I had recommended it at the time) is often considered the equivalent of not doing anything. The ubiquitous phrase “too little, too late” can be made to fit nearly every situation.

**Similarly, Trump claims that former FBI director James Comey lied to Congress about their conversations while simultaneously asserting that his threat to reveal nonexistent audio recordings compelled Comey to tell the truth.

The post Obama, the Russian Hacking, and the Folks Who Write about Them appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro d’été de Politique étrangère (n°2/2017). Matthieu Cimino propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Erminia Chiara Calabrese , Militer au Hezbollah. Ethnographie d’un engagement dans la banlieue sud de Beyrouth (Khartala/Ifpo, 2016, 296 pages).

Depuis plusieurs années, le Hezbollah catalyse une inflation de travaux de qualités inégales. Le sujet est rendu très attractif par sa centralité (le parti étant depuis 2011 lourdement impliqué en Syrie) ainsi que par le développement massif et éclaté des security studies, engagées autour des problématiques de terrorisme. L’autre raison tient à la difficulté d’accès aux sources : le Hezbollah, comme toute organisation militaire ou paramilitaire, assure sa pérennité par la protection de sa structure opérationnelle et militante, pour l’essentiel par le silence. Seul un nombre limité de chercheurs (à l’instar de Norton, Mervin ou Daher) a donc pu produire des ouvrages de qualité, issus de travaux de terrain, appuyés par une méthodologie rigoureuse et la maîtrise de l’arabe.

Apport considérable au corpus académique sur le parti chiite, la saisis­sante monographie de Calabrese s’inscrit dans cette filiation. Le livre est construit à partir de sources primaires, issues de multiples entretiens semi-directifs menés depuis 2005 avec des militants et sympathisants du Hezbollah ; un tel accès à l’épine dorsale activiste du parti, exceptionnel en soi, atteste d’une recherche de fond, menée sur le temps long, dans un environnement hermétique. À travers ces entretiens, l’auteur explore les modalités de l’engagement, tout en proposant une sociohistoire passionnante du Hezbollah, approchée à travers les représentations de ceux qui en constituent l’avant-garde. Par cette somme prosopographique, Calabrese déconstruit par ailleurs l’imaginaire politique entourant ces affiliés, invariablement présentés comme pauvres, très religieux et marqués par une expérience radicale du chiisme.

En sus, ce travail s’appuie sur un corpus théorique très récent, dont les réflexions d’Olivier Fillieule sur les processus d’engagement et d’action militante « par le bas », privilégiant l’approche individuelle et évitant l’écueil d’une perspective monoscalaire centrée sur les collectifs – bien que le livre veille à ne pas exagérer la centralité du premier ni à négliger l’influence des seconds. La méthodologie employée assure une infrastructure solide à cette monographie, organisée en six chapitres qui explorent la construction du réseau militant du Hezbollah, les modes différentiels de socialisation des jeunes du parti, la formation militante per se, les registres de mobilisation employés par le parti, le rôle et la charge symbolique du leader, Hassan Nasrallah, et enfin la symbo­logie de la résistance.

Si l’ensemble est dense et innovant, on retient d’abord la précision empirique avec laquelle sont décrits les mécanismes de recrutement du parti, ses procédures de sécurité opérationnelle ainsi que le cycle de façonnage de l’« identité partisane » de ses membres. Fort peu critiquable, cet ouvrage trouve peut-être une limite : ne pas questionner l’hubris comme mécanisme d’engagement des combattants. Au-delà des éléments constitutifs du milieu sociopolitique des interviewés (héritage familial, environnement éducatif…), on s’étonne de ne pas trouver chez eux de références à la quête d’un idéal de soi, ou au besoin de recherche personnelle et collective d’un ennemi. Cet élément mis à part, Militer au Hezbollah s’inscrit en référence des rares travaux monumentaux écrits sur le parti libanais.

Matthieu Cimino

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Only by working to heal the ideological, political, and military rifts in its own Arab ranks can Saudi Arabia feel secure of its position relative to Iran.

 
(article publié dans The Conversation)

En janvier 2017, nous nous interrogions sur le fait de savoir si le Président américain pouvait devenir l’ennemi pour ses alliés, européens notamment. Entre-temps, la présidence Trump a confirmé de nombreuses craintes : amateurisme, repli, provocations, tensions avec les partenaires… Dépeint tour à tour comme le porte-parole des faucons les plus durs, ou – ce qui n’est pas exclusif – comme un personnage en mal de reconnaissance, détruisant tout autour de lui faute de pouvoir briller autrement, Donald Trump a sérieusement altéré la relation transatlantique.
Sa première sortie internationale, qui après le Proche-Orient passait par l’OTAN et le G7, a produit au moins trois résultats. Elle a collectivement inquiété les Européens sur l’avenir de l’Alliance, rendu à la fois pessimiste et déterminée une Angela Merkel exaspérée, et intronisé le nouveau Président français, Emmanuel Macron, comme le contradicteur occidental le plus assumé du « trumpisme ».
Naissance d’un duoL’annonce, le 1e juin, du retrait américain de l’accord de Paris sur le climat, a intensifié ce face-à-face que l’on pressentait déjà : l’opposition de style entre le libéralisme, le multilatéralisme et le combat contre le repli nationaliste, prônés par Emmanuel Macron pendant sa campagne électorale, tranchaient avec les valeurs qui ont porté Donald Trump à la Maison Blanche. Dans son discours de sortie de l’accord climatique, Donald Trump a ainsi cité explicitement Paris, qui ne devait plus être « placé avant » un intérêt américain incarné pour l’occasion par « Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, et Pittsburgh, Pennsylvanie ». Dans les minutes qui ont suivi cette annonce, Emmanuel Macron a répliqué avec force sur le fond, et de manière inédite sur la forme.
Délivrant des messages en anglais qui depuis font florès sur les réseaux sociaux, il a invité les chercheurs américains à venir en France (osant un « la France est votre nation », et leur donnant du « you guys »). Il a rappelé que leur Président avait décidé de « mettre en péril » leurs budgets et leurs initiatives. Regrettant une décision américaine qualifiée de « véritable erreur pour les États-Unis et pour la planète », sa formule « Make the planet great again », détournant le slogan de campagne de Trump, a fait le tour du monde journalistique et numérique, comme un défi direct et personnel à celui qui annonce ses décisions présidentielles sur Twitter.
Deux récits, deux conceptions de la politique, deux hommes, deux générations, ont entamé un dialogue musclé, et seront systématiquement (et avec délice) présentés comme rivaux par les médias. La tension du dialogue dépasse désormais l’anecdote de la poignée de main, pour toucher à des questions de fond.
Une recomposition globale ?Lire La suite dans The Conversation