A la fin de la Guerre froide, en 1989-1991, certains crurent que les USA allaient entreprendre un grand d\u00e9bat de politique ext\u00e9rieure sur la possibilit\u00e9 d’un certain d\u00e9sengagement des affaires du monde. Il y avait une logique historique derri\u00e8re cette id\u00e9e, puisqu’on pouvait consid\u00e9rer que c’\u00e9tait la Guerre froide qui, apr\u00e8s la Deuxi\u00e8me Guerre mondiale, avait orient\u00e9 la politique US vers l’engagement ext\u00e9rieur. Le d\u00e9bat n’eut pas lieu, essentiellement parce que la premi\u00e8re guerre du Golfe (pr\u00e9misses \u00e0 partir d’ao\u00fbt 1990) fournit assez d’arguments au complexe militaro-industriel pour faire pression dans le sens du maintien de l’engagement, bient\u00f4t soutenu par Wall Street qui lan\u00e7a la globalisation financi\u00e8re avec la pr\u00e9sidence Clinton.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tAujourd’hui, quelques solides catastrophes plus tard dans l’aventure post<\/em>-9\/11, Justin Logan constate, dans The American Conservative<\/em> du 17 d\u00e9cembre<\/a>: \u00abArgue Like It’s 1991 The interventionist consensus breaks down, and an overdue debate begins.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tLogan, qui est du CATO Institute (centre libertarien mod\u00e9r\u00e9 tr\u00e8s oppos\u00e9 \u00e0 l’interventionnisme), estime que plusieurs signes montrent que le non-d\u00e9bat de 1989-91 pourrait bien \u00eatre en train de d\u00e9marrer vraiment, 16 ans plus tard.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00abBut there are several signs that the interventionist consensus is coming under increased scrutiny. The first is the undeniable success of Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s campaign for president. Though still languishing in in the polls, Paul shattered the single-day Republican fundraising record by pulling in more than $4 million on Nov. 5. The campaign had been garnering major attention from a media that is certainly not favorably inclined ideologically, with Paul appearing on the Tonight Show and in other high-profile venues. Paul is running on two major policy issues: returning to the gold standard and reversing the U.S. policy of attempting to run the Middle East. It’s left to the reader to determine to which of those policies we should ascribe his success.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbThere has also been a flurry of discussion in the foreign- policy community that hearkens back to the sweeping debate in 1991. Barry Posen, the head of the security studies program at MIT, penned an essay on grand strategy in the November\/December issue of the The American Interest entitled The Case for Restraint. Posen’s argument includes three main proposals: The United States needs to be more reticent about the use of military force; more modest about the scope for political transformation within and among countries; and more distant politically and militarily from traditional allies.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbAfter making a thorough case for his strategy, Posen cannot resist noting in closing that the interventionist consensus arrived at after the Cold War has been tested and failed. By contrast, he proposes that America should conceive its security interests narrowly, use its military power stingily, pursue its enemies quietly but persistently, share responsibilities and costs more equitably, watch and wait more patiently. Let’s do this for 16 years and see if the outcomes aren’t better.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbWhile the essay elicited surprisingly positive comments from reformed neocon Francis Fukuyama as well as from others, it sent interventionists of all stripes into apoplexy. From the left, former Princeton professor John Ikenberry complained that the Iraq war will be rendered all the more tragic if it leads America to pull back from its European and Asian security partnerships and its leadership in maintaining the institutional bases of global order. Likewise, conservative Josef Joffe complained that Posen’s strategy amounts to the familiar bogeyman of isolationism. Joffe then turned President Reagan’s dictum about peace through strength on its head by arguing that a great power must carry great burdens or else it stops being one. By this feeble logic, America would be even greater by taking on more commitments.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbOn the heels of Posen’s article came an essay in the November\/December issue of Foreign Affairs by Columbia professor Richard K. Betts making the argumentunthinkable six years agothat the defense budget is too big. Not including the supplemental spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States spends roughly as much on defense as does the rest of the world combinedand still almost all political figures insist we need to spend even more. Betts argues,Washington spends so much and yet feels so insecure because U.S. policymakers have lost the ability to think clearly about defense policy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbBetts’s most devastating point is that even the increases in military spending that have been proposed by the most hawkish presidential candidates would be woefully inadequate for supporting their imperial foreign policies. He sees a defense budget caught between two stools: higher than needed for basic security but far lower than required to eliminate all villainous governments and groups everywhere. It is this disconnect that has precipitated the most striking development in the debate over American national security in recent years: the bold entry of uniformed U.S. military officers into the debates over grand strategy and foreign policy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbSince the military lives or dies on the solvency of American foreign policy, it is understandable that the men and women who have been harmed most by the Bush administration’s foreign policy are feeling the need to weigh in. Although traditionally reticent about voicing their policy views in popular media, uniformed military personnel, both active duty and retired, have increasingly been speaking out. From Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling’s article A Failure in Generalship in the Armed Forces Journal, to the pessimistic August New York Times article authored by seven officers stationed in Iraq, to retired Gen. John Abizaid’s recent comments that the United States could live with a nuclear Iran, military officers are entering the debates over foreign policy, perhaps concerned that the discussion as it stood was failing to provide the kind of strategy worthy of their sacrifice.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tLe d\u00e9bat sur le d\u00e9sengagement US, en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral aussit\u00f4t d\u00e9nonc\u00e9 avec horreur comme un retour de l’isolationnisme par les interventionnistes, est une sorte de monstre du Loch Ness. Son ombre r\u00e9appara\u00eet \u00e9pisodiquement mais la chose ne se concr\u00e9tise pas. Ce n’est pas pour autant que ce d\u00e9bat n’est pas justifi\u00e9 ni m\u00eame n\u00e9cessaire et ces ratages peuvent aussi bien nourrir l’argument contraire : au plus ce d\u00e9bat est repouss\u00e9, au plus la situation des USA s’aggrave et exige qu’il soit effectivement lanc\u00e9 et conduit \u00e0 son terme. De ce point de vue, les derni\u00e8res ann\u00e9es ont \u00e9t\u00e9 bien significatives, bien lourdes, bien pressantes \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tAux arguments et citations de Logan, on pourrait ajouter l’orientation d’Hillary Clinton<\/a> ou l’une ou l’autre remarque d’un Robert Kagan<\/a>, deux personnalit\u00e9s en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral estampill\u00e9es interventionnistes (liberal hawk<\/em> pour Hillary, n\u00e9o-conservateur pour Kagan).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \tMis en ligne le 18 d\u00e9cembre 2007 \u00e0 09H59<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A la fin de la Guerre froide, en 1989-1991, certains crurent que les USA allaient entreprendre un grand d\u00e9bat de politique ext\u00e9rieure sur la possibilit\u00e9 d’un certain d\u00e9sengagement des affaires du monde. Il y avait une logique historique derri\u00e8re cette id\u00e9e, puisqu’on pouvait consid\u00e9rer que c’\u00e9tait la Guerre froide qui, apr\u00e8s la Deuxi\u00e8me Guerre mondiale,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6644,6261,3278,3490,1242,3382,7306,4607,2671],"class_list":["post-69513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-debat","tag-etrangere","tag-hillary","tag-interventionnisme","tag-isolationnisme","tag-kagan","tag-logan","tag-politique","tag-us"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}