REVUE DE PRESSE

Le New Yorker vient de publier un article passionnant sur la diplomatie de Barack Obama (versus les idées diplomatiques de John McCain). Cet article qui est le fruit d'une longue enquête permet de donner les premières grandes lignes d'une éventuelle administration Obama.

NONFICTION publie de larges extraits (en anglais) de cet article :

Worlds Apart

Obama, McCain, and the future of foreign policy.

par Nicholas LEMANN

When John Kerry came to the stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he saluted smartly and said he was reporting for duty. Kerry was a decorated Vietnam veteran and a senator with many years of foreign-policy experience. The Bush Administration’s central foreign-policy initiative, the war in Iraq, was going badly, and Kerry was supposed to be able to confront President Bush on the issue and win. But in the bleary aftermath, to people in the very small world of Democratic Party foreign-policy professionals, it seemed that Bush had somehow framed the election around foreign policy and managed to win, despite a weak hand. He did this mainly by presenting himself as more resolute, more fully alive to threats to the United States, and prepared to deal with them more harshly than Kerry—which was a variant on how Republicans had presented themselves for years.

While Bush was preparing for his second term, foreign-policy Democrats began preparing for the 2008 Presidential election. How could they prevent another version of 2004, with toughness as the fail-safe Republican argument? One way might be for the Democrats to scrub any remaining hint of docility from their reputation (though Kerry had tried to do that, and failed). Another would be to change the nature of the conversation. Barack Obama, even before announcing his candidacy, was deeply engaged in the latter approach.

Last summer, a small group of prominent foreign-policy Democrats who call themselves the Phoenix Initiative, and who first came together in early 2005—the link between their name and Kerry’s defeat should be obvious—published a report. It had the kind of aggressively bland title that is typical of such efforts (“Strategic Leadership: Framework for a Twenty-first Century National Security Strategy”) and got almost no attention. Reports like this rarely do, except in retrospect, such as a 2000 report by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, which laid some of the groundwork for the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. The Phoenix Initiative’s report was published with a brief preface by Susan E. Rice, who is one of Obama’s top foreign-policy advisers and is almost certain to serve in a high government position if he wins the Presidency. Rice, a brisk, direct woman in her early forties, had worked in the Clinton Administration, first on the National Security Council and then as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and had been part of John Kerry’s foreign-policy team in the 2004 campaign. The report lays out a new approach to American foreign policy, and in so doing it implicitly promises that the Democrats might be able, finally, to set the terms on national security.

“This report,” Rice writes in her preface, “breaks away from such traditional concepts as containment, engagement, and enlargement and rejects standard dichotomies of realist power politics versus liberal idealism.” It “offers bold and genuinely new thinking about America’s role.” The report lists five top “strategic priorities” for the United States. The first three are issues that governments, or even international organizations, can’t handle on their own: counterterrorism, nuclear proliferation, and, taken together, climate change and oil dependence. The other two are regional: the Middle East and East Asia. The report barely mentions great-power diplomacy, the traditional core concept of statecraft. It is not just post-Cold War but post-war on terror and, arguably, post-American hegemony. (It makes a point of describing the war in Iraq as a bad idea, rather than as a good idea poorly executed.) It speaks of “interconnectedness” and “diffuse power.” It isn’t dovish or sanguine, exactly—those top three strategic priorities are all threats—but it definitely does not envision American military power, or even power combined with diplomacy, as the only effective tool of foreign-policymaking.

Well before the Phoenix Initiative’s report came out, Obama was using similar themes in his speeches. In his first major foreign-policy address, delivered in Chicago in April, 2007, he said, “When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem, too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well. Whether it’s global terrorism or pandemic disease, dramatic climate change or the proliferation of weapons of mass annihilation, the threats we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries.”

John McCain talks about new kinds of threat sometimes, too, but his views on foreign policy are completely different from Obama’s, in tone and in substance. McCain’s chief focus is on great powers, and on the all-importance of maintaining American military and political primacy in the world. There is a lot at stake in foreign policy in this campaign. The next President will have two wars to pursue, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. McCain has said he believes both countries “can in time become pillars of stability, tolerance, and democracy,” as long as America commits military and economic resources to them. Obama wants to draw down U.S. forces in Iraq and focus on Afghanistan, and he tends to define the war there more in terms of the threat of terrorism than of the opportunity to establish a model democracy. “On Iraq, McCain is wedded to unrealistic goals,” Susan Rice told me. Whoever wins the election may have a chance to do something larger: propose a new defining idea for American foreign policy. For McCain, a history buff who loves to talk about America’s glorious military and diplomatic triumphs, the question has been whether he would be viewed as someone who understands how the world has changed. For Obama, the question is whether he can successfully keep the focus on his new ideas, which means avoiding the old routine of Democratic defensiveness on foreign policy.

The 2008 Democratic campaigns were staffing up in foreign policy in 2006, when Hillary Clinton looked like a sure bet to be the Party’s nominee. Just about every foreign-policy Democrat had worked in Bill Clinton’s Administration, and those who had been most prominent—such as Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State, and Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and negotiator of the Dayton peace accords—signed on with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. A few people pulled off the tricky feat of not endorsing anybody (something that campaigns don’t find endearing, and that the 2008 Clinton campaign, in particular, didn’t) and, instead, as the saying goes, “offering advice to anyone who might find it helpful.” Dennis Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator, is one of those, and another is James Steinberg, the former deputy national-security adviser, now at a safe distance from Washington as dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. (Both would be likely to serve in an Obama Administration.) For the most part, though, the other Democratic campaigns represented an opportunity for less obvious foreign-policy names to place their career bets in a way that might produce a dramatic return in 2009.

So, although it is accurate to say that Barack Obama’s foreign-policy team is led by people who served in the Clinton Administration, this formulation leaves out what is most important about them: They broke with Bill and Hillary Clinton in a way that they knew the Clinton camp would remember. They saw Obama as the bolder, more visionary candidate, the one who understood how profoundly the world had changed and how completely American foreign policy had to change, too.

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