The revolution will not be televised The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live … Gil Scott-Heron
La femme serait vraiment l’égale de l’homme le jour où, à un poste important, on désignerait une femme incompétente. Françoise Giroud (Le Monde, 11.03.83)
After seizing a large segment of Iraq and Syria, beheading Western hostages on camera and slaughtering civilians in the heart of Paris, ISIS has eclipsed its extremist rival as the biggest brand in global jihad. But U.S. officials tell NBC News that al Qaeda — though its core in Pakistan has been degraded by years of CIA drone strikes — is now experiencing renewed strength through its affiliates, led by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen and the Nusra Front in Syria. (…) Both branches have expanded their territorial holdings over the last year amid civil wars. Russian air strikes against the Nusra Front, and CIA drone attacks on AQAP leaders, have set them back, but have not come close to destroying them. Al Qaeda has not managed to attack a Western target recently, but it continues to inspire plots. There is no evidence December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California was directed by al Qaeda, but Syed Rizwan Farook, who carried out the attack with his wife Tashfeen Malik, appears to have been radicalized by al Qaeda long before the rise of ISIS. He was a consumer of videos by al Qaeda’s Somalia affiliate and the AQAP preacher Anwar al Awlaki, court records show. Al Qaeda attacks on hotels in Burkina Faso in January and Mali in November, which together killed dozens of people, appeared to affirm the threat posed by the terror group’s Saharan branch, al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb, or AQIM. (…) intelligence officials are also « concerned al Qaeda could reestablish a significant presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if regional counterterrorism pressure deceases. » In Yemen, AQAP has benefitted from the power vacuum created by the Houthi rebels’ uprising, and the air war on the Houthis by Saudi Arabia. « Jabhat al Nusra is a core component of the al Qaeda network and probably poses the most dangerous threat to the U.S. from al Qaeda in the coming years, » the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report. « Al Qaeda is pursuing phased, gradual, and sophisticated strategies that favor letting ISIS attract the attention — and attacks — of the West while it builds the human infrastructure to support and sustain major gains in the future and for the long term. » (…) Hoffman, who served as the CIA’s Scholar-in-Residence for Counterterrorism, calls Nusra « even more dangerous and capable than ISIS. » Al Qaeda is watching ISIS « take all the heat and absorb all the blows while al Qaeda quietly re-builds its military strength, » he said. NBC
The number of Cubans entering the United States nearly doubled last year, compared with the year before. That trend shows no signs of slowing. More Cubans are coming to the United States because they fear that a thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations will end a longstanding policy granting legal status to any Cuban national who reaches dry land in the United States. (…) Obama is headed to Havana on March 21, the first U.S. president to do so in 88 years. Cuellar supports the President’s efforts to improve relations between the two countries, but he hopes Obama addresses the migration issue while in Havana, as well as the lack of political freedoms on the island and other human rights issues. That’s a sentiment shared by many of the migrants waiting to see an immigration officer at the Laredo border crossing. « I hope he talks to the real people, » says Melian, the migrant waiting at the Laredo border crossing. « I hope he doesn’t allow himself to be fooled by the Castros as they fooled the world for many years. » CNN
By 2011, Iraq certainly seemed viable. Only a few dozen American peacekeepers were killed in Iraq in 2011 — a total comparable to the number of U.S. soldiers who die in accidents in an average month. The complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops in December 2011 abruptly turned what President Obama had dubbed a « sovereign, stable and self-reliant » Iraq — and what Vice President Joe Biden had called one of the administration’s « greatest achievements » — into a nightmarish wasteland. (…) Hillary Clinton bragged of the 2011 airstrikes in Libya and the eventual death of Gadhafi: « We came, we saw, he died. » But destroying Gadhafi’s forces from the air and then abandoning Libya to terrorists and criminals only created an Islamic State recruiting ground. The Benghazi disaster was the nearly inevitable result of washing our hands of the disorder that we had helped to create. (…) Donald Trump has rightly reminded us during his campaign that Americans are sick and tired of costly overseas interventions. But what Trump forgets is that too often the world does not always enjoy a clear choice between good and bad, wise and stupid. Often the dilemma is the terrible choice between ignoring mass murderer, as in Rwanda or Syria; bombing and leaving utter chaos, as in Libya; and removing monsters, then enduring the long ordeal of trying to leave something better, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. The choices are all awful. But the idea that America can bomb a rogue regime, leave and expect something better is pure fantasy. Victor Davis Hanson
Barack Obama is the Dr. Frankenstein of the supposed Trump monster. If a charismatic, Ivy League-educated, landmark president who entered office with unprecedented goodwill and both houses of Congress on his side could manage to wreck the Democratic Party while turning off 52 percent of the country, then many voters feel that a billionaire New York dealmaker could hardly do worse. If Obama had ruled from the center, dealt with the debt, addressed radical Islamic terrorism, dropped the politically correct euphemisms and pushed tax and entitlement reform rather than Obamacare, Trump might have little traction. A boring Hillary Clinton and a staid Jeb Bush would most likely be replaying the 1992 election between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush — with Trump as a watered-down version of third-party outsider Ross Perot. But America is in much worse shape than in 1992. And Obama has proved a far more divisive and incompetent president than George H.W. Bush. Little is more loathed by a majority of Americans than sanctimonious PC gobbledygook and its disciples in the media. And Trump claims to be PC’s symbolic antithesis. Making Machiavellian Mexico pay for a border fence or ejecting rude and interrupting Univision anchor Jorge Ramos from a press conference is no more absurd than allowing more than 300 sanctuary cities to ignore federal law by sheltering undocumented immigrants. Putting a hold on the immigration of Middle Eastern refugees is no more illiberal than welcoming into American communities tens of thousands of unvetted foreign nationals from terrorist-ridden Syria. In terms of messaging, is Trump’s crude bombast any more radical than Obama’s teleprompted scripts? Trump’s ridiculous view of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a sort of « Art of the Deal » geostrategic partner is no more silly than Obama insulting Putin as Russia gobbles up former Soviet republics with impunity. Obama callously dubbed his own grandmother a « typical white person, » introduced the nation to the racist and anti-Semitic rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and petulantly wrote off small-town Pennsylvanians as near-Neanderthal « clingers. » Did Obama lower the bar for Trump’s disparagements? Certainly, Obama peddled a slogan, « hope and change, » that was as empty as Trump’s « make America great again. » (…) How does the establishment derail an out-of-control train for whom there are no gaffes, who has no fear of The New York Times, who offers no apologies for speaking what much of the country thinks — and who apparently needs neither money from Republicans nor politically correct approval from Democrats? Victor Davis Hanson
So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be. Robert Kagan
People wonder what accounts for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Maybe the better question is how the Obama years could not have produced a Trump and Sanders. Both the Republican and, to a lesser extent, Democratic parties have elements now who want to pull down the temple. But for all the politicized agitation, both these movements, in power, would produce stasis—no change at all. Donald Trump would preside over a divided government or, as he has promised and un-promised, a trade war with China. Hillary or Bernie will enlarge the Obama economic regime. Either outcome guarantees four more years of at best 2% economic growth. That means more of the above. That means 18-year-olds voting for the first time this year will face historically weak job opportunities through 2020 at least. Under any of these three, an Americanized European social-welfare state will evolve because Washington—and this will include many “conservatives”—will answer still-rising popular anger with new income redistributions. And for years afterward, Barack Obama will stroll off the 18th green, smiling. Mission, finally, accomplished. Daniel Henninger
We’re in the midst of a rebellion. The bottom and middle are pushing against the top. It’s a throwing off of old claims and it’s been going on for a while, but we’re seeing it more sharply after New Hampshire. This is not politics as usual, which by its nature is full of surprise. There’s something deep, suggestive, even epochal about what’s happening now. I have thought for some time that there’s a kind of soft French Revolution going on in America, with the angry and blocked beginning to push hard against an oblivious elite. It is not only political. Yes, it is about the Democratic National Committee, that house of hacks, and about a Republican establishment owned by the donor class. But establishment journalism, which for eight months has been simultaneously at Donald Trump’s feet (“Of course you can call us on your cell from the bathtub for your Sunday show interview!”) and at his throat (“Trump supporters, many of whom are nativists and nationalists . . .”) is being rebelled against too. Their old standing as guides and gatekeepers? Gone, and not only because of multiplying platforms. (…) All this goes hand in hand with the general decline of America’s faith in its institutions. We feel less respect for almost all of them—the church, the professions, the presidency, the Supreme Court. The only formal national institution that continues to score high in terms of public respect (72% in the most recent Gallup poll) is the military (…) we are in a precarious position in the U.S. with so many of our institutions going down. Many of those pushing against the system have no idea how precarious it is or what they will be destroying. Those defending it don’t know how precarious its position is or even what they’re defending, or why. But people lose respect for a reason. (…) It’s said this is the year of anger but there’s a kind of grim practicality to Trump and Sanders supporters. They’re thinking: Let’s take a chance. Washington is incapable of reform or progress; it’s time to reach outside. Let’s take a chance on an old Brooklyn socialist. Let’s take a chance on the casino developer who talks on TV. In doing so, they accept a decline in traditional political standards. You don’t have to have a history of political effectiveness anymore; you don’t even have to have run for office! “You’re so weirdly outside the system, you may be what the system needs.” They are pouring their hope into uncertain vessels, and surely know it. Bernie Sanders is an actual radical: He would fundamentally change an economic system that imperfectly but for two centuries made America the wealthiest country in the history of the world. In the young his support is understandable: They have never been taught anything good about capitalism and in their lifetimes have seen it do nothing—nothing—to protect its own reputation. It is middle-aged Sanders supporters who are more interesting. They know what they’re turning their backs on. They know they’re throwing in the towel. My guess is they’re thinking something like: Don’t aim for great now, aim for safe. Terrorism, a world turning upside down, my kids won’t have it better—let’s just try to be safe, more communal. A shrewdness in Sanders and Trump backers: They share one faith in Washington, and that is in its ability to wear anything down. They think it will moderate Bernie, take the edges off Trump. For this reason they don’t see their choices as so radical. (…) The mainstream journalistic mantra is that the GOP is succumbing to nativism, nationalism and the culture of celebrity. That allows them to avoid taking seriously Mr. Trump’s issues: illegal immigration and Washington’s 15-year, bipartisan refusal to stop it; political correctness and how it is strangling a free people; and trade policies that have left the American working class displaced, adrift and denigrated. Mr. Trump’s popularity is propelled by those issues and enabled by his celebrity. (…) Mr. Trump is a clever man with his finger on the pulse, but his political future depends on two big questions. The first is: Is he at all a good man? Underneath the foul mouthed flamboyance is he in it for America? The second: Is he fully stable? He acts like a nut, calling people bimbos, flying off the handle with grievances. Is he mature, reliable? Is he at all a steady hand? Political professionals think these are side questions. “Let’s accuse him of not being conservative!” But they are the issue. Because America doesn’t deliberately elect people it thinks base, not to mention crazy. Peggy Noonan
But honestly, Donald Trump reminds me of the Kim Kardashian of politics – they’re both famous for being famous and the media plays along. Carly Fiorina
Politicians have, since ancient Greece, lied, pandered, and whored. They have taken bribes, connived, and perjured themselves. But in recent times—in the United States, at any rate—there has never been any politician quite as openly debased and debauched as Donald Trump. Truman and Nixon could be vulgar, but they kept the cuss words for private use. Presidents have chewed out journalists, but which of them would have suggested that an elegant and intelligent woman asking a reasonable question was dripping menstrual blood? LBJ, Kennedy, and Clinton could all treat women as commodities to be used for their pleasure, but none went on the radio with the likes of Howard Stern to discuss the women they had bedded and the finer points of their anatomies. All politicians like the sound of their own names, but Roosevelt named the greatest dam in the United States after his defeated predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Can one doubt what Trump would have christened it? That otherwise sober people do not find Trump’s insults and insane demands outrageous (Mexico will have to pay for a wall! Japan will have to pay for protection!) says something about a larger moral and cultural collapse. His language is the language of the comments sections of once-great newspapers. Their editors know that the online versions of their publications attract the vicious, the bigoted, and the foulmouthed. But they keep those comments sections going in the hope of getting eyeballs on the page. (…) The current problem goes beyond excruciatingly bad manners. What we increasingly lack, and have lacked for some time, is a sense of the moral underpinning of republican (small r) government. Manners and morals maintain a free state as much as laws do, as Tocqueville observed long ago, and when a certain culture of virtue dies, so too does something of what makes democracy work. Old-fashioned words like integrity, selflessness, frugality, gravitas, and modesty rarely rate a mention in modern descriptions of the good life—is it surprising that they don’t come up in politics, either? (…) Trump’s rise is only one among many signs that something has gone profoundly amiss in our popular culture.It is related to the hysteria that has swept through many campuses, as students call for the suppression of various forms of free speech and the provision of “safe spaces” where they will not be challenged by ideas with which they disagree. The rise of Trump and the fall of free speech in academia are equal signs that we are losing the intellectual sturdiness and honesty without which a republic cannot thrive. (…) The rot is cultural. It is no coincidence that Trump was the star of a “reality” show. He is the beneficiary of an amoral celebrity culture devoid of all content save an omnipresent lubriciousness. He is a kind of male Kim Kardashian, and about as politically serious. In the context of culture, if not (yet) politics, he is unremarkable; the daily entertainments of today are both tawdry and self-consciously, corrosively ironic. Ours is an age when young people have become used to getting news, of a sort, from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, when an earlier generation watched Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. It is the difference between giggling with young, sneering hipsters and listening to serious adults. Go to YouTube and look at old episodes of Profiles in Courage, if you can find them—a wildly successful television series based on the book nominally authored by John F. Kennedy, which celebrated an individual’s, often a politician’s, courage in standing alone against a crowd, even a crowd with whose politics the audience agreed. The show of comparable popularity today is House of Cards. Bill Clinton has said that he loves it. American culture is, in short, nastier, more nihilistic, and far less inhibited than ever before. It breeds alternating bouts of cynicism and hysteria, and now it has given us Trump. The Republican Party as we know it may die of Trump. If it does, it will have succumbed in part because many of its leaders chose not to fight for the Party of Lincoln, which is a set of ideas about how to govern a country, rather than an organization clawing for political and personal advantage. What is at stake, however, is something much more precious than even a great political party. To an extent unimaginable for a very long time, the moral keel of free government is showing cracks. It is not easy to discern how we shall mend them. Eliot Cohen
Some explanations for Donald Trump’s success emphasize his focus on supposedly working-class issues – namely, immigration and trade – after a refusal by the GOP “establishment” to address them. When the Wall Street Journal condemns his “crude assessment of the economic relationship with China” and sneers that his “pander[ing] to his party’s nativist wing… may have endeared him to one or two radio talk show hosts” but will prove an electoral disaster, the editors only underscore the base-to-establishment gap. Except I just did that thing where I tell you the quote is about one person and it is really about someone else. Those criticisms were leveled by the Wall Street Journal, but in 2012, at Mitt Romney. From early in the primaries, Romney took the unheard-of stance that China cheated on trade and should be aggressively confronted. He even called for retaliatory tariffs against continued currency manipulation and intellectual property theft. Similarly, on immigration, Romney was far to the right by the standards of either the 2012 or 2016 GOP fields. While his use of the phrase “self-deportation” was certainly inartful, the position was similar to the one Ted Cruz has since staked out. (Though Cruz may have shifted bizarrely rightward in the last 24 hours.) He stood by it right through the general-election debates with President Obama. The post-2012 effort by the GOP to reposition itself on immigration was not an extension of the Romney approach, but rather a reaction. (…) The real difference is that Romney held himself each day to the highest standards of decency and felt keenly the burdens of leadership, while Trump is an entertainer committed to delivering whatever irrational blather of insults, threats, and lies will earn the most retweets. Sometimes the blather may take the form of a “policy” proposal like mass deportation or a ban on Muslims, but that is still part of the show – not a suggestion for how to run the country. (…) Yes he has “tapped into anger,” but let’s stop pretending it is a rational anger at problems ignored. (…) The sad irony is this: the intelligentsia’s confidence that Trump would fade was in fact a strong sign of their respect for the judgment of the Republican base. If you are looking for the people who truly disdained those voters, find the pundits who predicted from the beginning that this guy might actually win. Yet by flocking to him now, Trump voters are ensuring they will be a punchline –sometimes feared, but never respected – for years to come. Oren Cass
Si l’on regarde les élections américaines avec un regard français – et c’est ce que nous faisons tous malgré nous -, il représente le contrepoint parfait de ce que représentent les hommes politiques français. Et c’est pour cela que nous le soutenons. Il est un ovni pour la France. Il affiche sans honte son argent et affiche clairement ses idées. Concrètement, il n’a pas peur de renverser la table si besoin, ni de déplaire. On l’aime pour ce qu’il est, ou on le rejette entièrement. En plus de ses propos assumés, il a une véritable prestance, un charisme. Pour tout cela, il représente un électrochoc pour la vie politique française. En soutenant Donald Trump, nous revendiquons avant tout notre envie d’avoir un homme politique de cette trempe en France. (…) Nous ne soutenons pas Les Républicains, ni le Front national. Nous sommes avant tout des déçus de la politique telle qu’elle est pratiquée en France. On soutient Donald Trump pour changer cela. Mais la question n’est pas d’importer les États-Unis en France, il s’agit simplement de profiter de la montée de Donald Trump pour changer les choses chez nous. Les Français sont prêts à avoir un Trump à l’Élysée, j’en suis convaincu, mais il devra être assez solide pour ne pas renoncer à ses principes au nom d’une certaine bien pensance. Il ne doit pas avoir peur de mettre les pieds dans le plat.
Il ne suffit pas, pour faire un bon président, d’effaroucher les bien-pensants, même si c’est une condition incontournable, ou d’avoir raison après tout le monde. Et puis est venue cette idée, peut-être devenue promesse depuis la publication de cet article, de ne plus laisser entrer les musulmans sur le sol des États-Unis. Je sais bien qu’il ne faut pas dire « les », il faut dire « des », j’ai compris la leçon. Oui, mais alors lesquels ? Telle est la question que Donald rétorque à nos indignations. Avant que des musulmans balancent des avions dans des tours ou que d’autres flinguent des handicapés, les uns comme les autres étaient de paisibles citoyens, des voisins sans histoires, des étudiants appréciés, ou des travailleurs honnêtes, car on ne peut, au pays de la troisième récidive et de la peine de mort, devenir terroriste après avoir fait carrière dans le banditisme. Comment faire, donc, pour distinguer les terroristes musulmans parmi les musulmans ? Et que faire si la mission s’avère impossible ? C’est en posant ces questions, que devrait se poser tout responsable politique qui s’est penché sur le vrai sens des mots « responsable » et « politique », que Donald est remonté dans mon estime. C’est en opposant à la liberté de circulation le principe de précaution (surtout utilisé pour nous empêcher de vivre libres, et qui pourrait bien, en l’occurrence, nous empêcher de mourir jeunes), qu’il est devenu mon candidat. La solution est radicale, entière, brutale, américaine et nous paraît folle, comme tout ce qui nous vient d’outre-Atlantique avec vingt ans d’avance, pour nous apparaître comme moderne, vingt ans après. Ainsi, les Américains ont fermé, au temps de la guerre froide, leur pays au communisme. On se souvient du maccarthysme et des questions risibles posées par les douaniers aux nouveaux arrivants, immigrés ou touristes : Appartenez-vous au crime organisé ? Êtes-vous membre du parti communiste ? Ils ont su, sous la réprobation du monde entier, éviter d’être contaminés par cette maladie du xxe siècle. Nous avons eu, en France et en Europe, une autre approche. Nous avons fait le pari que cette idéologie dangereuse et liberticide se dissoudrait dans la démocratie et dans l’économie de marché. Et nous avons gagné. Chez nous, il ne reste du communisme qu’un parti crépusculaire et folklorique, une curiosité européenne où se retrouvent des écrivains chics, idiots utiles du village souverainiste – utiles à qui, on se le demande ? On les lit avec bonheur quand ils ne parlent pas de politique. Mais alors deux questions se posent : le monde libre aura-t-il raison de l’islamisme comme il a eu raison du communisme ? Pouvons-nous attendre vingt ans pour le savoir ? Cyril Benassar
Three major have-not powers are seeking to overturn the post-Cold War status quo: Russia in Eastern Europe, China in East Asia, Iran in the Middle East. All are on the march. To say nothing of the Islamic State, now extending its reach from Afghanistan to West Africa. The international order built over decades by the United States is crumbling. In the face of which, what does Obama do? Go to Cuba. Yes, Cuba. A supreme strategic irrelevance so dear to Obama’s anti-anti-communist heart. The international order built over decades by the United States is crumbling. Is he at least going to celebrate progress in human rights and democracy — which Obama established last year as a precondition for any presidential visit? Of course not. When has Obama ever held to a red line? Indeed, since Obama began his “historic” normalization with Cuba, the repression has gotten worse. Last month, the regime arrested 1,414 political dissidents, the second-most ever recorded. No matter. Amid global disarray and American decline, Obama sticks to his cherished concerns: Cuba, Guantanamo (about which he gave a rare televised address this week), and, of course, climate change. Obama could not bestir himself to go to Paris in response to the various jihadi atrocities — sending Kerry instead “to share a big hug with Paris” (as Kerry explained) with James Taylor singing “You’ve Got a Friend” — but he did make an ostentatious three-day visit there for climate change. More Foreign Policy The Costs of Abandoning Messy Wars Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad Are Running U.S. Syria Policy With Disasters Everywhere, It’s Time to Take Foreign Policy Seriously Again So why not go to Havana? Sure, the barbarians are at the gates and pushing hard knowing they will enjoy but eleven more months of minimal American resistance. But our passive president genuinely believes that such advances don’t really matter — that these disrupters are so on the wrong side of history, that their reaches for territory, power, victory are so 20th century. Of course, it mattered greatly to the quarter-million slaughtered in Syria and the millions more exiled. It feels all quite real to a dissolving Europe, an expanding China, a rising Iran, a metastasizing jihadism. Not to the visionary Obama, however. He sees far beyond such ephemera. He knows what really matters: climate change, Gitmo, and Cuba. With time running out, he wants these to be his legacy. Indeed, they will be. Charles Krauthammer
Donald Trump has rightly reminded us during his campaign that Americans are sick and tired of costly overseas interventions. But what Trump forgets is that too often the world does not always enjoy a clear choice between good and bad, wise and stupid. Often the dilemma is the terrible choice between ignoring mass murderer, as in Rwanda or Syria; bombing and leaving utter chaos, as in Libya; and removing monsters, then enduring the long ordeal of trying to leave something better, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. The choices are all awful. But the idea that America can bomb a rogue regime, leave and expect something better is pure fantasy. Victor Davis Hanson
The many millions of Americans who are sick of being called racist, chauvinist, homophobic, privileged or extremist every time they breathe feel that in Trump they have found their voice. Then there is that gnawing sense that under Obama, America has been transformed from history’s greatest winner into history’s biggest sucker. (…) Trump’s continuous exposition on his superhuman deal-making talents speaks to this fear. Trump’s ability to viscerally connect to the deep-seated concerns of American voters and assuage them frees him from the normal campaign requirement of developing plans to accomplish his campaign promises. (…) Trump’s supporters don’t care that his economic policies contradict one another. They don’t care that his foreign policy declarations are a muddle of contradictions. They hate the establishment and they want to believe him. (…) Because he knows how to viscerally connect to the public, Trump will undoubtedly be a popular president. But since he has no clear philosophical or ideological underpinning, his policies will likely be inconsistent and opportunistic.(…) In this, a Trump presidency will be a stark contrast to Obama’s hyper-ideological tenure in office. So, too, his presidency will be a marked contrast to a similarly ideologically driven Clinton or Sanders administration, since both will more or less continue to enact Obama’s domestic and foreign policies. (…) Like Trump, Johnson is able to tap into deep-seated public dissatisfaction with the political and cultural elites and serve as a voice for the disaffected. (…) If Johnson is able to convince a majority of British voters to support an exit from the EU, then several other EU member states are likely to follow in Britain’s wake. The exit of states from the EU will cause a political and economic upheaval in Europe with repercussions far beyond its borders. Just as a Trump presidency will usher in an era of high turbulence and uncertainty in US economic and foreign policies, so a post-breakup EU and Western Europe will replace Brussels’ consistent policies with policies that are more varied, and unstable. (…) If Trump is elected president and if Britain leads the charge of nations out of the EU, then Israel can expect its relations with both the US and Europe to be marked by turbulence and uncertainty that can lead in a positive direction or a negative direction, or even to both directions at the same time. (…) Just as Trump has stated both that he will support Israel and be neutral toward Israel, so we can expect for Trump to stand by Israel one day and to rebuke it angrily, even brutally, the next day. (…) So, too, under Trump, the US may send forces to confront Iran one day, only to announce that Trump is embarking on negotiations to get a sweetheart deal with the ayatollahs the next. Or perhaps all of these things will happen simultaneously. Caroline Glick
Attention: un accident industriel pourrait en cacher un autre !
Alors qu’avec pas moins, entre la Russie, la Chine et l’Iran et sans compter les djiadistes, de trois menaces majeures à l’ordre post-guerre froide sous ses mandats …
L’un des probables pires présidents américains achève en cette dernière année qu’il lui reste à la Maison Blanche …
Entre promesses vides (Guantanamo) et visites à l’un ou l’autre dictateur de la planète (Cuba) …
La magistrale démonstration qu’un président noir pouvait être tout aussi mauvais qu’un président blanc …
Pendant que du côté républicain et notamment néoconservateur certains en sont même à menacer de voter démocrate …
Comment ne pas voir …
Avec l’apparemment irrésistible et aussi rafraichissante qu’inquiétante ascension d’un champion de l’impolitiquement correct …
Mais aussi des idées simples et des boniments comme Trump …
Et sans parler du plus rouge que rouge Sanders …
Le même risque de l’arrivée comme il y a huit ans …
D’un nouvel accident industriel à la tête du Monde libre?
State of the World: Year Eight of Barack Obama
Charles Krauthammer
National review
February 25, 2016
(1) In the South China Sea, on a speck of land of disputed sovereignty far from its borders, China has just installed anti-aircraft batteries and stationed fighter jets. This after China landed planes on an artificial island it created on another disputed island chain (the Spratlys, claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam). These facilities now function as forward bases for Beijing to challenge seven decades of American naval dominance of the Pacific Rim. “China is clearly militarizing the South China Sea,” the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command told Congress on Tuesday. Its goal? “Hegemony in East Asia.”
(2) Syria. Russian intervention has turned the tide of war. Having rescued the Bashar al-Assad regime from collapse, relentless Russian bombing is destroying the rebel stronghold of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, creating a massive new wave of refugees and demonstrating to the entire Middle East what a Great Power can achieve when it acts seriously. The U.S. response? Repeated pathetic attempts by Secretary of State John Kerry to propitiate Russia (and its ally, Iran) in one collapsed peace conference after another. On Sunday, he stepped out to announce yet another “provisional agreement in principle” on “a cessation of hostilities” that the CIA director, the defense secretary, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs deem little more than a ruse.
(3) Ukraine. Having swallowed Crimea so thoroughly that no one even talks about it anymore, Russia continues to trample with impunity on the Minsk cease-fire agreements. Vladimir Putin is now again stirring the pot, intensifying the fighting, advancing his remorseless campaign to fracture and subordinate the Ukrainian state. Meanwhile, Obama still refuses to send the Ukrainians even defensive weapons.
(4) Iran. Last Thursday, Iran received its first shipment of S-300 anti-aircraft batteries from Russia, a major advance in developing immunity to any attack on its nuclear facilities. And it is negotiating an $8 billion arms deal with Russia that includes sophisticated combat aircraft. Like its ballistic missile tests, this conventional weapons shopping spree is a blatant violation of U.N. Security Council prohibitions. It was also a predictable — and predicted — consequence of the Iran nuclear deal that granted Iran $100 billion and normalized its relations with the world. The U.S. response? Words. Share article on Facebook share Tweet article tweet Unlike gravitational waves, today’s strategic situation is not hard to discern. Three major have-not powers are seeking to overturn the post-Cold War status quo: Russia in Eastern Europe, China in East Asia, Iran in the Middle East. All are on the march. To say nothing of the Islamic State, now extending its reach from Afghanistan to West Africa. The international order built over decades by the United States is crumbling. In the face of which, what does Obama do? Go to Cuba. Yes, Cuba. A supreme strategic irrelevance so dear to Obama’s anti-anti-communist heart. The international order built over decades by the United States is crumbling. Is he at least going to celebrate progress in human rights and democracy — which Obama established last year as a precondition for any presidential visit? Of course not. When has Obama ever held to a red line? Indeed, since Obama began his “historic” normalization with Cuba, the repression has gotten worse. Last month, the regime arrested 1,414 political dissidents, the second-most ever recorded. No matter. Amid global disarray and American decline, Obama sticks to his cherished concerns: Cuba, Guantanamo (about which he gave a rare televised address this week), and, of course, climate change.
Obama could not bestir himself to go to Paris in response to the various jihadi atrocities — sending Kerry instead “to share a big hug with Paris” (as Kerry explained) with James Taylor singing “You’ve Got a Friend” — but he did make an ostentatious three-day visit there for climate change. More Foreign Policy The Costs of Abandoning Messy Wars Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad Are Running U.S. Syria Policy With Disasters Everywhere, It’s Time to Take Foreign Policy Seriously Again So why not go to Havana? Sure, the barbarians are at the gates and pushing hard knowing they will enjoy but eleven more months of minimal American resistance. But our passive president genuinely believes that such advances don’t really matter — that these disrupters are so on the wrong side of history, that their reaches for territory, power, victory are so 20th century. Of course, it mattered greatly to the quarter-million slaughtered in Syria and the millions more exiled. It feels all quite real to a dissolving Europe, an expanding China, a rising Iran, a metastasizing jihadism. Not to the visionary Obama, however. He sees far beyond such ephemera. He knows what really matters: climate change, Gitmo, and Cuba. With time running out, he wants these to be his legacy. Indeed, they will be.
Voir aussi:
The tough choices of overseas intervention
Victor Davis Hanson
Townhall
February 25, 2016
The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban.
As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then abruptly left the targeted country, chaos has followed. But when America has followed up its use of force with unpopular peacekeeping, sometimes American interventions have led to something better.
The belated entry of the United States into World War I saved the sinking Allied cause in 1917. Yet after the November 1918 armistice, the United States abruptly went home, washed its hands of Europe’s perennial squabbling and disarmed. A far bloodier World War II followed just two decades later.
It may have been wise or foolish for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to have intervened in Vietnam in 1963-1964 to try to save the beleaguered non-communist south. But after 10 years of hard fighting and a costly stalemate, it was nihilistic for America to abandon a viable South Vietnam to invading communist North Vietnam. Re-education camps, mass executions and boat people followed — along with more than 40 years of communist oppression.
The current presidential candidates are refighting the Iraq war of 2003. Yet the critical question 13 years later is not so much whether the United States should or should not have removed the genocidal Saddam Hussein, but whether our costly efforts at reconstruction ever offered any hope of a stable Iraq.
By 2011, Iraq certainly seemed viable. Only a few dozen American peacekeepers were killed in Iraq in 2011 — a total comparable to the number of U.S. soldiers who die in accidents in an average month.
The complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops in December 2011 abruptly turned what President Obama had dubbed a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” Iraq — and what Vice President Joe Biden had called one of the administration’s “greatest achievements” — into a nightmarish wasteland.
Hillary Clinton bragged of the 2011 airstrikes in Libya and the eventual death of Gadhafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”
But destroying Gadhafi’s forces from the air and then abandoning Libya to terrorists and criminals only created an Islamic State recruiting ground. The Benghazi disaster was the nearly inevitable result of washing our hands of the disorder that we had helped to create.
In contrast, when the United States did not pack up and go home after its messy wars, our unpopular interventions often helped make life far better for all involved — and the U.S. and its allies more secure.
The United States inherited a mess in the Philippines in 1899 after the defeat of imperial Spain in the Spanish-American war. But after more than a decade of bloody counterinsurgency fighting, America finally birthed a Philippine national government that was given its independence after World War II.
President Harry Truman’s intervention to save South Korea from North Korean aggression quickly turned into a quagmire. Communist China soon launched a massive invasion into the Korean peninsula. By 1953 — at a cost of roughly 35,000 American lives, about eight times more U.S. fatalities than in Iraq — America had at least saved a viable South Korea.
President Eisenhower, facing re-election in 1956, resisted calls to pull American peacekeepers from the Demilitarized Zone and quit the detested “Truman’s war.”
More than 60 years after the U.S. saved South Korea, thousands of American peacekeepers still help protect a democratic and successful south from a nightmarish, totalitarian and nuclear north.
Some 60 million people died in World War II, a global war that the United States did not start and did not enter until 1941. Yet American power helped defeat the Axis aggressors.
Unlike the aftermath of World War I, the United States stayed on to help rebuild war-torn Europe and Asia after World War II. The Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, the defeat of Soviet Union in the Cold War, the foundations of the later European Union, and Asian economic dynamism all followed — along with some 70 years of relative peace.
In 1999, President Clinton convinced the NATO alliance to bomb Serbia’s genocidal Slobodan Milosevic out of power and stop the mass killing in the Balkans. After Milosevic’s removal, only the presence of American-led NATO peacekeepers on the ground prevented another round of mass murder.
Donald Trump has rightly reminded us during his campaign that Americans are sick and tired of costly overseas interventions. But what Trump forgets is that too often the world does not always enjoy a clear choice between good and bad, wise and stupid. Often the dilemma is the terrible choice between ignoring mass murderer, as in Rwanda or Syria; bombing and leaving utter chaos, as in Libya; and removing monsters, then enduring the long ordeal of trying to leave something better, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The choices are all awful. But the idea that America can bomb a rogue regime, leave and expect something better is pure fantasy.
Voir également:
Trump, the EU crack-up and Israel
What accounts for the billionaire populist’s success?
Caroline Glick
The Jerusalem Post
02/25/16
After his smashing back-to-back victories in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and the Nevada caucuses, going into next week’s Super Tuesday contests in 12 states, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump looks increasingly unbeatable.
What accounts for the billionaire populist’s success? And if Trump does become the next US president, what sort of leader will the former reality television star be? Trump is popular because he has a rare ability to channel the deep-seated frustrations that much of the American public harbors toward its political and cultural elites.
Trump’s presidential bid isn’t based on specific, defined economic or foreign policy platforms or plans. Indeed, it isn’t clear that he even has any.
Trump’s campaign is based on his capacity to resonate two deeply felt frustrations harbored by a large cross-section of American citizens.
As The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger explained recently, a very large group of Americans is frustrated – or enraged – by the intellectual and social terror exercised upon them by the commissars of political correctness.
Trump’s support levels rise each time he says something “politically incorrect.” His candidacy took off last summer when he promised to build a wall along the Mexican border. It rose again last November when, following the Islamic massacre in Paris, he said that if elected he will ban Muslim immigration to the US.
The many millions of Americans who are sick of being called racist, chauvinist, homophobic, privileged or extremist every time they breathe feel that in Trump they have found their voice.
Then there is that gnawing sense that under Obama, America has been transformed from history’s greatest winner into history’s biggest sucker.
Trump’s continuous exposition on his superhuman deal-making talents speaks to this fear.
Trump’s ability to viscerally connect to the deep-seated concerns of American voters and assuage them frees him from the normal campaign requirement of developing plans to accomplish his campaign promises.
Trump’s supporters don’t care that his economic policies contradict one another. They don’t care that his foreign policy declarations are a muddle of contradictions.
They hate the establishment and they want to believe him.
This then brings us to the question of how a president Donald Trump would govern.
Because he knows how to viscerally connect to the public, Trump will undoubtedly be a popular president. But since he has no clear philosophical or ideological underpinning, his policies will likely be inconsistent and opportunistic.
In this, a Trump presidency will be a stark contrast to Obama’s hyper-ideological tenure in office.
So, too, his presidency will be a marked contrast to a similarly ideologically driven Clinton or Sanders administration, since both will more or less continue to enact Obama’s domestic and foreign policies.
The US is far from the only country steeped in uncertainty and frustration today.
Today, the peoples of Western Europe are behaving much like the Americans in their increased rejection of the political and cultural elites. Like Trump’s growing band of supporters, Western Europeans are increasingly embracing populists.
Whether these leaders come from the Right or the Left, they all make a similar pledge to restore their nations to a previous glory.
These promises are based as well on a common rejection of the European Union. Like their voters, populist European politicians believe that the EU is a bureaucratic monstrosity that has pulverized and seeks to blot out their national characters while it seizes their national sovereignty.
Due to this growing popular opposition to the EU, establishment leaders throughout Western Europe find themselves fighting for their political survival. Whether their desire to exit the EU owes to its open borders policies in the face of massive Muslim immigration or to the euro debt crisis, with each passing month, the very concept of a unified Europe loses its appeal for more and more Europeans.
On June 23, this growing disenchantment is liable to bring about the beginning of the EU’s breakup. That day, British voters will determine whether or not the United Kingdom will remain in the EU.
Popular London Mayor and Conservative MP Boris Johnson is now leading the campaign calling for Britain to leave the EU against the will of Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservative party establishment.
In recent days, several commentators have claimed that Johnson is Britain’s Donald Trump.
Like Trump, Johnson is able to tap into deep-seated public dissatisfaction with the political and cultural elites and serve as a voice for the disaffected.
If Johnson is able to convince a majority of British voters to support an exit from the EU, then several other EU member states are likely to follow in Britain’s wake.
The exit of states from the EU will cause a political and economic upheaval in Europe with repercussions far beyond its borders. Just as a Trump presidency will usher in an era of high turbulence and uncertainty in US economic and foreign policies, so a post-breakup EU and Western Europe will replace Brussels’ consistent policies with policies that are more varied, and unstable.
For Israel, instability is not necessarily a bad thing. For the past several years, we have consistently suffered under the stable, unswerving anti-Israel policies of both the EU and the Obama administration.
Our inability to influence these policies was brought home last week with the government’s announcement that it is renewing Israel’s diplomatic dialogue with the EU.
Following the EU’s announcement in November that it was implementing its bigoted, arguably unlawful labeling policy against Israeli goods produced beyond the 1949 armistice lines, the government announced that Israel was suspending its diplomatic dialogue with the EU. The government hoped that by forcing Europe to pay a diplomatic price for its hostility, Brussels would back down.
But as it turned out, the ban made no impact on the EU, whose only clear, consistent foreign policy is to oppose Israel. And so, last week, the government cried uncle and announced that it is reinstituting its diplomatic dialogue with the EU.
A senior official explained that Israel chose to end the dispute because it wished to avoid having the labeling policy used as an issue in the debate about the future of the EU. EU champions made it clear to Israeli officials that if the labeling issue wasn’t swept under the rug, then Israel would be liable to be blamed if EU member states opt to exit the union.
Clearly the government is right to seek to avoid having Israel used as an issue in the debates on the future of the EU. But then again, it is also clear that Israel’s foes – led by the likes of the Belgians – don’t need an excuse to attack us.
On the other hand, by backing down, Israel signaled to its European opponents that they can escalate their war against us with impunity.
Moreover, despite the threats of EU officials, it is fairly ridiculous to think that they future of the EU has anything to do with how Israel responds to its political war against us. The Europeans who wish to exit the EU, like those who wish to remain, feel the way they do because of issues that have little to do with Israel.
Beyond the narrow question of how to respond to the labeling assault, from Israel’s perspective, the rise of Trump like the rise of Johnson and the anti-EU forces in Europe indicates that in the coming years, both the US and Europe are likely to move in one of two directions – and Israel has to be prepared for both eventualities.
If the next US president is a Democrat, and if the EU remains intact, then Israel can expect for its relations with the US and the EU to remain in crisis mode for the foreseeable future.
If Trump is elected president and if Britain leads the charge of nations out of the EU, then Israel can expect its relations with both the US and Europe to be marked by turbulence and uncertainty that can lead in a positive direction or a negative direction, or even to both directions at the same time.
Just as Trump has stated both that he will support Israel and be neutral toward Israel, so we can expect for Trump to stand by Israel one day and to rebuke it angrily, even brutally, the next day.
So, too, under Trump, the US may send forces to confront Iran one day, only to announce that Trump is embarking on negotiations to get a sweetheart deal with the ayatollahs the next.
Or perhaps all of these things will happen simultaneously.
As for Europe, whereas the EU stalwarts will likely ratchet up their hostility toward Israel, and we may even see the likes of Sweden or Belgium cut off relations with us, states that leave the EU may be willing to vastly improve their bilateral relations with Israel diplomatically, economically and militarily.
Moreover, if the EU begins to break up, it is likely that the European economy will contract.
As Israel’s largest trading partner, a European recession will hurt Israel.
Whether Trump rises or falls, is defeated by a Republican rival or by a Democratic opponent, and whether or not the EU breaks apart or remains intact, Israel’s leaders need to prepare for the plausible scenarios of either prolonged crises in relations with the US, Europe or both, or turbulent relations that are unpredictable and subject to constant change with one or both of them.
Under these circumstances, the first conclusion that needs to be drawn is that now is not the time to expand our military dependence on the US. Consequently, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon should not conclude an agreement for expanded US security assistance to Israel for the next decade.
Beyond that, Israel needs to expand on the steps that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold are already taking to expand Israel’s network of alliances to Africa and Asia. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s visit this week marked just the latest achievement of this vital project. Israel’s diplomatic opening to Asia and Africa needs to be matched by similar military and economic openings and expansions of ties.
In the final analysis, Trump’s rise in America and the rise of the populists in Europe is yet another indication of the West’s growing identity crisis fueled by its economic, social, military and cultural weakness. Israel needs to read the writing on the wall and act appropriately lest we become a casualty of that identity crisis.
Voir encore:
Trump, Sanders and the American Rebellion
As institutions lose respect, voters think: Let’s take a chance.
Peggy Noonan
The Wall Street Journal
Feb. 11, 2016
What is happening in American politics?
We’re in the midst of a rebellion. The bottom and middle are pushing against the top. It’s a throwing off of old claims and it’s been going on for a while, but we’re seeing it more sharply after New Hampshire. This is not politics as usual, which by its nature is full of surprise. There’s something deep, suggestive, even epochal about what’s happening now.
I have thought for some time that there’s a kind of soft French Revolution going on in America, with the angry and blocked beginning to push hard against an oblivious elite. It is not only political. Yes, it is about the Democratic National Committee, that house of hacks, and about a Republican establishment owned by the donor class. But establishment journalism, which for eight months has been simultaneously at Donald Trump’s feet (“Of course you can call us on your cell from the bathtub for your Sunday show interview!”) and at his throat (“Trump supporters, many of whom are nativists and nationalists . . .”) is being rebelled against too. Their old standing as guides and gatekeepers? Gone, and not only because of multiplying platforms. Gloria Steinem thought she owned feminism, thought she was feminism. She doesn’t and isn’t. The Clintons thought they owned the party—they don’t. Hedge-funders thought they owned the GOP. Too bad they forgot to buy the base!
All this goes hand in hand with the general decline of America’s faith in its institutions. We feel less respect for almost all of them—the church, the professions, the presidency, the Supreme Court. The only formal national institution that continues to score high in terms of public respect (72% in the most recent Gallup poll) is the military.
A few years ago I gave a lecture to a class at West Point, the text of which was: You are entering the only U.S. institution left standing. Your prime responsibility throughout your careers will be to keep it respected. I then told them about the Dreyfus case. They had not heard of it. I explained how that scandal rocked public faith in a previously exalted institution, the French army, doing it and France lasting damage. And so your personal integrity is of the utmost importance, I said, as day by day that integrity creates the integrity of the military. The cadets actually listened to that part.
I mention this to say we are in a precarious position in the U.S. with so many of our institutions going down. Many of those pushing against the system have no idea how precarious it is or what they will be destroying. Those defending it don’t know how precarious its position is or even what they’re defending, or why. But people lose respect for a reason.
To New Hampshire: The rejection of the establishment’s preferred candidates in both major parties is a big moment. It is also understandable, the result of 15 years of failed presidencies. It is a gesture of rebuke toward the political class—move aside.
It’s said this is the year of anger but there’s a kind of grim practicality to Trump and Sanders supporters. They’re thinking: Let’s take a chance. Washington is incapable of reform or progress; it’s time to reach outside. Let’s take a chance on an old Brooklyn socialist. Let’s take a chance on the casino developer who talks on TV.
In doing so, they accept a decline in traditional political standards. You don’t have to have a history of political effectiveness anymore; you don’t even have to have run for office! “You’re so weirdly outside the system, you may be what the system needs.”
They are pouring their hope into uncertain vessels, and surely know it. Bernie Sanders is an actual radical: He would fundamentally change an economic system that imperfectly but for two centuries made America the wealthiest country in the history of the world. In the young his support is understandable: They have never been taught anything good about capitalism and in their lifetimes have seen it do nothing—nothing—to protect its own reputation.
It is middle-aged Sanders supporters who are more interesting. They know what they’re turning their backs on. They know they’re throwing in the towel. My guess is they’re thinking something like: Don’t aim for great now, aim for safe. Terrorism, a world turning upside down, my kids won’t have it better—let’s just try to be safe, more communal.
A shrewdness in Sanders and Trump backers: They share one faith in Washington, and that is in its ability to wear anything down. They think it will moderate Bernie, take the edges off Trump. For thus reason they don’t see their choices as so radical.
As for Mr. Trump, it is not without meaning that his supporters have had eight months to measure the cost of satisfying their anger by voting for him. In New Hampshire, 35% of the electorate decided that for all his drama and uncertainty they would back him.
The mainstream journalistic mantra is that the GOP is succumbing to nativism, nationalism and the culture of celebrity. That allows them to avoid taking seriously Mr. Trump’s issues: illegal immigration and Washington’s 15-year, bipartisan refusal to stop it; political correctness and how it is strangling a free people; and trade policies that have left the American working class displaced, adrift and denigrated. Mr. Trump’s popularity is propelled by those issues and enabled by his celebrity.
In winning, Donald Trump threw over the GOP donor class. Political professionals don’t fully appreciate that, but normal Americans see it. They get that the guy with money just slapped silly the guys with money. Every hedge-fund billionaire donor should be blinking in pain. Some investment!
This leads me to Citizens United. Conservatives applauded that Supreme Court decision because it allowed Republicans to counter the effect of union money that goes to Democrats. But Citizens United gave the rich too much sway in the GOP. The party was better off when it relied on Main Street. It meant they had to talk to Main Street.
Mr. Trump is a clever man with his finger on the pulse, but his political future depends on two big questions. The first is: Is he at all a good man? Underneath the foul mouthed flamboyance is he in it for America? The second: Is he fully stable? He acts like a nut, calling people bimbos, flying off the handle with grievances. Is he mature, reliable? Is he at all a steady hand?
Political professionals think these are side questions. “Let’s accuse him of not being conservative!” But they are the issue. Because America doesn’t deliberately elect people it thinks base, not to mention crazy.
Anyway, we are in some kind of moment. Congratulations to the establishments of both parties for getting us here. They are the authors of the rebellion; they are a prime thing being rebelled against.
Connected to that, something I’ve noticed. In Washington there used to be a widespread cliché: “God protects drunks, children and the United States of America.” I’m in Washington a lot, and I’ve noticed no one says that anymore. They stopped 10 or 15 years ago. I wonder what that means.
2016 AND BEYOND
The Age of Trump
Eliot A. Cohen
February 26, 2016
At stake is something far more precious than the future of the Republican Party.
How on earth did this happen? Some, like Robert Kagan, think it is solely the result of a prolonged self-poisoning of the Republican Party. A number of shrewd writers—David Frum, Tucker Carlson, Ben Domenech, Charles Murray, and Joel Kotkin being among the best—have probed deeper. Not surprisingly, they are all some flavor of conservative. On the liberal (or, as they say now, progressive) end of the spectrum the reaction has been chiefly one of smugness (“well, that’s what the Republicans are, we knew it all along”), schadenfreude (“pass the popcorn”), and chicken-counting (“now we can get a head start on Hillary’s first Inaugural”). Their insouciance will be stripped away if Trump becomes the nominee and turns his cunning, ferocity, and charm on an inept, boring politician trailing scandals as old as dubious investments with a 1,000 percent return and as fresh as a homebrew email server. He might lose. He might, however, very well tear her to pieces. Clearly, he relishes the prospect, because he despises the politicians he has bought over the years.
The conservative analysts offer a number of arguments—a shifting class structure, liberal overreach in social policy, existential anxiety about the advent of a robot-driven economy, the stagnation since the Great Recession, and more. They note (as most liberal commentators have yet to do) Trump’s formidable political skills, including a visceral instinct for detecting and exploiting vulnerability that has been the hallmark of many an authoritarian ruler. These insights are all to the point, but they do not capture one key element. Moral rot.
Politicians have, since ancient Greece, lied, pandered, and whored. They have taken bribes, connived, and perjured themselves. But in recent times—in the United States, at any rate—there has never been any politician quite as openly debased and debauched as Donald Trump. Truman and Nixon could be vulgar, but they kept the cuss words for private use. Presidents have chewed out journalists, but which of them would have suggested that an elegant and intelligent woman asking a reasonable question was dripping menstrual blood? LBJ, Kennedy, and Clinton could all treat women as commodities to be used for their pleasure, but none went on the radio with the likes of Howard Stern to discuss the women they had bedded and the finer points of their anatomies. All politicians like the sound of their own names, but Roosevelt named the greatest dam in the United States after his defeated predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Can one doubt what Trump would have christened it?
That otherwise sober people do not find Trump’s insults and insane demands outrageous (Mexico will have to pay for a wall! Japan will have to pay for protection!) says something about a larger moral and cultural collapse. His language is the language of the comments sections of once-great newspapers. Their editors know that the online versions of their publications attract the vicious, the bigoted, and the foulmouthed. But they keep those comments sections going in the hope of getting eyeballs on the page.
Winston Churchill recalls in his memoir how as a young man he came to terms with hypocrisy, discovering the “enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of a great people.” Inconsistency between public virtue and private vice is not altogether a bad thing. No matter how nasty the realities are, maintaining respectable appearances, minding the civilities, and adhering to the conventions is part of what keeps civilization going.
The current problem goes beyond excruciatingly bad manners. What we increasingly lack, and have lacked for some time, is a sense of the moral underpinning of republican (small r) government. Manners and morals maintain a free state as much as laws do, as Tocqueville observed long ago, and when a certain culture of virtue dies, so too does something of what makes democracy work. Old-fashioned words like integrity, selflessness, frugality, gravitas, and modesty rarely rate a mention in modern descriptions of the good life—is it surprising that they don’t come up in politics, either?
William James, a pacifist who understood this point, argued in “The Moral Equivalent War” that “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt.” Just so. Trump might have become a less upsetting figure if he had not wriggled through the clutches of the draft in the 1960s.
Trump’s rise is only one among many signs that something has gone profoundly amiss in our popular culture.It is related to the hysteria that has swept through many campuses, as students call for the suppression of various forms of free speech and the provision of “safe spaces” where they will not be challenged by ideas with which they disagree. The rise of Trump and the fall of free speech in academia are equal signs that we are losing the intellectual sturdiness and honesty without which a republic cannot thrive.
There are other traces of rot. They can be seen in the excuses that political leaders and experts have begun to make as they cozy up to Trump. Like French bureaucrats in the age of Vichy, or Italian aristocrats in the age of Mussolini, they are already saying things like: “I can make it less bad,” “He’s different in private,” “He has his good points,” “He is evolving,” and “Someone has to do the work of government.” Of course, some politicians—Chris Christie, that would be you—simply skip the pretense and indulge in spite or opportunism as the mood takes them.
This is not the first age in which politicians have taken morally disgraceful positions, even by the standards of their time. In the 1950s and 1960s there were flagrant bigots in Congress. But many of them were in other ways public spirited—think Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, for example, who presided with dignity over the Senate Armed Services Committee for nearly two decades. Lyndon Johnson may not have opposed the evils of his time forthrightly, but he used the full extent of his wiliness to break through the institutionalized discrimination of the South. The villainy of today takes softer forms, but it is pervasive—politicians swallow their principles (such as they are) and endorse a candidate they despise, turn on a judge they once praised, denounce the opposition for behavior identical to their own, or press their branch’s prerogatives and rules to the Constitutional limit, and beyond.
The rot is cultural. It is no coincidence that Trump was the star of a “reality” show. He is the beneficiary of an amoral celebrity culture devoid of all content save an omnipresent lubriciousness. He is a kind of male Kim Kardashian, and about as politically serious. In the context of culture, if not (yet) politics, he is unremarkable; the daily entertainments of today are both tawdry and self-consciously, corrosively ironic. Ours is an age when young people have become used to getting news, of a sort, from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, when an earlier generation watched Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. It is the difference between giggling with young, sneering hipsters and listening to serious adults. Go to YouTube and look at old episodes of Profiles in Courage, if you can find them—a wildly successful television series based on the book nominally authored by John F. Kennedy, which celebrated an individual’s, often a politician’s, courage in standing alone against a crowd, even a crowd with whose politics the audience agreed. The show of comparable popularity today is House of Cards. Bill Clinton has said that he loves it.
American culture is, in short, nastier, more nihilistic, and far less inhibited than ever before. It breeds alternating bouts of cynicism and hysteria, and now it has given us Trump.
The Republican Party as we know it may die of Trump. If it does, it will have succumbed in part because many of its leaders chose not to fight for the Party of Lincoln, which is a set of ideas about how to govern a country, rather than an organization clawing for political and personal advantage. What is at stake, however, is something much more precious than even a great political party. To an extent unimaginable for a very long time, the moral keel of free government is showing cracks. It is not easy to discern how we shall mend them.
Voir aussi:
Trump is the GOP’s Frankenstein monster. Now he’s strong enough to destroy the party.
Robert Kagan
The Washington Post
February 25
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Post.
When the plague descended on Thebes, Oedipus sent his brother-in-law to the Delphic oracle to discover the cause. Little did he realize that the crime for which Thebes was being punished was his own. Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus. A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics. The party searches desperately for the cause and the remedy without realizing that, like Oedipus, it is the party itself that brought on this plague. The party’s own political crimes are being punished in a bit of cosmic justice fit for a Greek tragedy.
Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements; the persistent call for nullification of Supreme Court decisions; the insistence that compromise was betrayal; the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition — that taught Republican voters that government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership and even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at? Was it not Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), among many others, who set this tone and thereby cleared the way for someone even more irreverent, so that now, in a most unenjoyable irony, Cruz, along with the rest of the party, must fall to the purer version of himself, a less ideologically encumbered anarcho-revolutionary? This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself.
Then there was the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks. No, the majority of Republicans are not bigots. But they have certainly been enablers. Who began the attack on immigrants — legal and illegal — long before Trump arrived on the scene and made it his premier issue? Who was it who frightened Mitt Romney into selling his soul in 2012, talking of “self-deportation” to get himself right with the party’s anti-immigrant forces? Who was it who opposed any plausible means of dealing with the genuine problem of illegal immigration, forcing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to cower, abandon his principles — and his own immigration legislation — lest he be driven from the presidential race before it had even begun? It was not Trump. It was not even party yahoos. It was Republican Party pundits and intellectuals, trying to harness populist passions and perhaps deal a blow to any legislation for which President Obama might possibly claim even partial credit. What did Trump do but pick up where they left off, tapping the well-primed gusher of popular anger, xenophobia and, yes, bigotry that the party had already unleashed?
Then there was the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified. Has the president done a poor job in many respects? Have his foreign policies, in particular, contributed to the fraying of the liberal world order that the United States created after World War II? Yes, and for these failures he has deserved criticism and principled opposition. But Republican and conservative criticism has taken an unusually dark and paranoid form. Instead of recommending plausible alternative strategies for the crisis in the Middle East, many Republicans have fallen back on a mindless Islamophobia, with suspicious intimations about the president’s personal allegiances.
Thus Obama is not only wrong but also anti-American, un-American, non-American, and his policies — though barely distinguishable from those of previous liberal Democrats such as Michael Dukakis or Mario Cuomo — are somehow representative of something subversive. How surprising was it that a man who began his recent political career by questioning Obama’s eligibility for office could leap to the front of the pack, willing and able to communicate with his followers by means of the dog-whistle disdain for “political correctness”?
We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of “angry” people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years, and it has been Trump’s good fortune to be the guy to sweep them up and become their standard-bearer. He is the Napoleon who has harvested the fruit of the Revolution.
There has been much second-guessing lately. Why didn’t party leaders stand up and try to stop Trump earlier, while there was still time? But how could they have? Trump was feeding off forces in the party they had helped nurture and that they hoped to ride into power. Some of those Republican leaders and pundits now calling for a counterrevolution against Trump were not so long ago welcoming his contribution to the debate. The politicians running against him and now facing oblivion were loath to attack him before because they feared alienating his supporters. Instead, they attacked one another, clawing at each other’s faces as they one by one slipped over the cliff. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got his last deadly lick in just before he plummeted — at Trump? No, at Rubio. Jeb Bush spent millions upon millions in his hopeless race, but against whom? Not Trump.
So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.
Voir de plus:
What If Trump Doesn’t Have Billions?
Jim Geraghty
National Review
February 25, 2016
There’s a good chance we’ll never see his tax returns. Why would Mitt Romney go on national television and declare, “I think we have good reason to believe that there’s a bombshell in Donald Trump’s taxes. Either he’s not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn’t been paying the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay”? Since when does buttoned-down, white-bread Mitt Romney make audacious, provocative accusations?
Romney’s accusation might be a safe bet — if not to be verified, then to never be refuted. Just a few years ago, Trump refused to release un-redacted tax returns, even when it could help him win a $5 billion libel lawsuit against a New York Times reporter and author. If Trump was unwilling to release his returns in that circumstance, how likely is it that Trump will release them before Election Day?
Trump’s wealth is a key part of his public image, his status in the eyes of his fans, and his self-image. On July 15, Trump issued a statement declaring, “As of this date, Mr. Trump’s net worth is in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” (Capital letters in original.)
In October, Forbes magazine offered its own assessment of the mogul’s wealth, concluding, “After interviewing more than 80 sources and devoting unprecedented resources to valuing a single fortune, we’re going with a figure less than half that — $4.5 billion, albeit still the highest figure we’ve ever had for him.” They pointed out that in 2014, Trump’s organization provided documentation for cash and cash equivalents of $307 million. This year his team claimed to have $793 million in cash, but were unwilling to provide documentation.
Listing all the net-worth figures Trump has claimed over the years, Gawker compared them with the significantly smaller sums indicated by available financial information.
But the most glaring evidence supporting Romney’s insinuation comes from Trump’s 2007 libel lawsuit against New York Times reporter Tim O’Brien. In his book TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, O’Brien wrote: Three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances, people who had worked closely with him for years, told me that they thought his net worth was somewhere between $150 million and $250 million. By anyone’s standards this still qualified Donald as comfortably wealthy, but none of these people thought he was remotely close to being a billionaire.
Trump contended that passage was a lie and damaged his reputation. Trump fought, lost in court, appealed, and lost again. If Trump’s fortune is multiple billions as he contends, one or two tax returns would have demonstrated the three sources were wildly off-base.
In a recent interview with National Review’s Ian Tuttle, O’Brien said, “The case dragged on for as long as it did because he wouldn’t comply with discovery requests. He wouldn’t turn over the tax returns, then the tax returns came in almost so completely redacted as to be useless.”
The New Jersey Superior Court in its decision offered a blistering rebuke to Trump, contending that there was no good reason to conclude that O’Brien’s sources were being dishonest:
O’Brien has certified that he re-interviewed his three confidential sources prior to publishing their net worth estimates, and he has produced notes of his meetings with them both in 2004 and in 2005. The notes are significant, in that they provide remarkably similar estimates of Trump’s net worth, thereby suggesting the accuracy of the information conveyed. Further, the accounts of the sources contain significant amounts of additional information that O’Brien was able to verify independently.
Even worse, the court concluded that Trump was an untrustworthy source for estimates of his own net worth: “It is indisputable that Trump’s estimates of his own worth changed substantially over time and thus failed to provide a reliable measure against which the accuracy of the information offered by the three confidential sources could be gauged.”
The three-judge panel essentially called the mogul a liar: “The materials that Trump claims to have provided to O’Brien were incomplete and unaudited, and did not contain accurate indications of Trump’s ownership interests in properties, his liabilities, and his revenues, present or future.”
The court even cited a 2000 Fortune article detailing past Trump financial exaggerations: That difficulty is compounded by Trump’s astonishing ability to prevaricate. No one’s saying Trump ought to be held to the same standards of truthfulness as everyone else; he is, after all, Donald Trump. But when Trump says he owns 10% of the Plaza hotel, understand that what he actually means is that he has the right to 10% of the profit if it’s ever sold. When he says he’s building a “90-story building” next to the U.N., he means a 72-story building that has extra-high ceilings. And when he says his casino company is the “largest employer in the state of New Jersey,” he actually means to say it is the eighth-largest. One of Trump’s central arguments was that any lower figure failed to correctly account for the financial value of the Trump “brand.” He contended under oath, “These statements . . . never included the value of the brand. And there are those who say the brand is very, very valuable.” The court rejected this contention: “As Trump’s accountants acknowledge in the 2004 Statement of Financial Condition, under generally accepted accounting principles, reputation is not considered a part of a person’s net worth.” More Donald Trump Trump’s Milquetoast Distancing from White Supremacists How to Stop Clinton and Trump Me ’n’ Chris O’Brien’s lawyers cited documents from Deutsche Bank in 2005; the bank was underwriting a $640 million construction loan it made to Trump’s Chicago condo and hotel project. Deutsche Bank estimated Trump’s net worth was $788 million. That year Trump told the New York Times he was worth $5 billion to $6 million. During the libel suit, Trump had 5 billion reasons to just show his full tax returns and prove the author’s estimate was wildly off base. But he did not. If he did not release un-redacted returns then, he isn’t likely to release un-redacted returns now. Romney’s accusation will remain unanswered and unrefuted . . . probably forever.
— Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent of National Review.
Voir de même:
Obama’s Legacy: Trump and Bernie
How could have Obama’s policies not have produced Trump and Sanders?
Daniel Henninger
The Wall Street Journal
Jan. 13, 2016
There is Barack Obama’s State of the Union and there is the state of the union anyone else can see.
The new year began with an underground nuclear-bomb test in North Korea, the worst first week for the Dow since 1897, and Iran forcing 10 U.S. sailors to their knees.
But the man delivering the State of the Union is “optimistic” because “unconditional love” will win.
Let’s get just one SotU venting out of the way before considering what Mr. Obama has wrought for his country and its politics as he turns into his final year.
It is beyond any conceivable pale that Mr. Obama would fail at least to note the 14 Americans gunned down in San Bernardino by committed Islamic terrorists, even as he stood there lecturing the country, at least three times, about not turning against others’ religion. In the past, he said, we have “turned toward God.” Ugh.
In fact, seven years of the Obama presidency have left the United States with a historically weak economy and a degraded national politics. The causal legacy of those two realities are— Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Mr. Obama said in his speech that the economy is producing jobs, which is true, and that it is “peddling fiction” to say the U.S. economy “is in decline.” Really?
The U.S. economy’s average annual growth rate since World War II has been about 3%. In Mr. Obama’s seven years it has been about 2%. Some 65% of people think the U.S. is on the wrong track. You can discover a lot about the wrong track in that missing 1% of economic growth, Mr. Obama’s “new normal.”
The president is correct that the economy is creating jobs, but an alternative view would be that he has proven it is not possible to kill an economy with a GDP of $16 trillion.
Here’s what the new normal looks like. The gold standard of new job creation is business starts. Indeed, Mr. Obama said his new online tools “give an entrepreneur everything he or she needs to start a business in a single day.” Perhaps not everything.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of business establishments less than one year old rose steadily from 550,000 in 1997, peaked at about 650,000 in 2006, and then has gone straight down. The Kauffman Foundation’s 2015 entrepreneurship report puts startups in 2012 at just over 400,000.
The Brookings Institution in a 2014 report noted that since 2008 businesses closing annually have exceeded startups for the first time. Their yearly analysis dates to 1978.
That relative decline has a price. More businesses being born than dying is where real jobs come from, not the government tooth fairy. This data is a portrait of an economy losing its innate dynamism. That’s the real cause of “anger” in the U.S. electorate.
We’re supposed to believe that long-term “structural” factors are causing these shifts. Maybe. And if you want to wail about income disparity, go ahead. But if so, it is the president’s job to get impediments out of the way. Instead, this presidency has created them.
For example, Kauffman’s report also notes that the rate of entrepreneurship among people age 20-34—who hire employees like themselves, new breadwinners—began dropping fast in 2011. The president said Tuesday that ObamaCare would help new-business formation. It is doing the opposite. Millennials, assumed to be the Obama base, have entered adulthood to endure a decade of slow growth.
The leaders of Communist China lie awake at night worrying about creating 10 million new jobs every year to prevent a revolution. The elected leader of the U.S. lies awake every night thinking about jobs making . . . windmills and solar panels.
And we’ve got a revolution.
People wonder what accounts for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Maybe the better question is how the Obama years could not have produced a Trump and Sanders.
Both the Republican and, to a lesser extent, Democratic parties have elements now who want to pull down the temple. But for all the politicized agitation, both these movements, in power, would produce stasis—no change at all.
Donald Trump would preside over a divided government or, as he has promised and un-promised, a trade war with China. Hillary or Bernie will enlarge the Obama economic regime. Either outcome guarantees four more years of at best 2% economic growth. That means more of the above. That means 18-year-olds voting for the first time this year will face historically weak job opportunities through 2020 at least.
Under any of these three, an Americanized European social-welfare state will evolve because Washington—and this will include many “conservatives”—will answer still-rising popular anger with new income redistributions.
And for years afterward, Barack Obama will stroll off the 18th green, smiling. Mission, finally, accomplished.
Voir également:
Voir enfin:
Des soutiens de Donald Trump en France séduits par «un véritable discours de droite»
Yohan Blavignat
Le Figaro
2016/02/23
INTERVIEW – Le porte-parole du comité de soutien de Donald Trump en France, Vivien Hoch, témoigne au Figaro les raisons pour lesquelles il soutient le candidat républicain. Déçu de la vie politique française, il espère que les élections américaines changeront la droite française.
Les primaires américaines, prélude à l’élection présidentielle qui se déroulera le 8 novembre prochain outre-Atlantique, battent leur plein. Si, chez les démocrates, la concurrence est féroce entre les deux candidats Hillary Clinton et Bernie Sanders, du côté des républicains, Donald Trump caracole largement en tête. Le milliardaire a remporté trois consultations. Il est également en tête des intentions de vote dans la plupart des onze États qui participeront – côté républicain – au Super Tuesday, le 1er mars.
Si sa candidature semblait anecdotique il y a encore quelques mois, Donald Trump a réussi à inverser la tendance de manière spectaculaire, au point d’apparaître comme le successeur potentiel de Barack Obama à la Maison-Blanche. Ses propos controversés envers les migrants, les homosexuels ou encore ses prises de position contre l’avortement ont séduit les électeurs américains, mais également certains hommes politiques et citoyens français. Un comité de soutien a ainsi été fondé fin septembre 2015, lorsque la candidature de Trump n’en était qu’à ses balbutiements, par une dizaine de personnes, dont Vivien Hoch, qui est aussi le porte-parole du mouvement. Doctorant en philosophie, vice-président de l’association Chrétienté-Solidarité, directeur de la communication de l’Agrif (Alliance Générale contre le Racisme et pour le respect de l’Identité Française et chrétienne), «passionné de politique», il explique les raisons pour lesquelles ils soutiennent le candidat républicain, et livre une vision désenchantée de la politique française.
LE FIGARO – La candidature de Donald Trump aux États-Unis prend de plus en plus d’ampleur depuis plusieurs semaines. Ressentez-vous cette dynamique en France, où le candidat républicain est très critiqué?
Vivien Hoch. – Lorsque nous avons fondé ce comité, nous ne nous attendions pas à une telle mobilisation populaire autour de Donald Trump aux États-Unis. Tout a été très vite. Si nous étions une petite dizaine de membres au départ, nous comptons aujourd’hui une centaine de sympathisants qui nous écrivent régulièrement, et qui sont impliqués dans sa campagne. Parmi eux figurent notamment des Américains membres du parti républicain venus vivre en France. D’autres sont simplement des citoyens français qui s’intéressent à la politique et voient dans la candidature de Donald Trump une chance pour les États-Unis, mais aussi pour la France. Ils voient au-delà du Trump bashing qui a lieu dans les médias français. Je n’ai d’ailleurs jamais vu un candidat tant décrédibilisé. Il y a une réelle incompréhension, pourtant un candidat comme Marc Rubio n’est pas non plus un tendre.
Pourquoi soutenir un candidat très clivant comme Donald Trump qui défend une politique très dure vis-à-vis des migrants, de l’avortement ou des armes à feu?
Si l’on regarde les élections américaines avec un regard français – et c’est ce que nous faisons tous malgré nous -, il représente le contrepoint parfait de ce que représentent les hommes politiques français. Et c’est pour cela que nous le soutenons. Il est un ovni pour la France. Il affiche sans honte son argent et affiche clairement ses idées. Concrètement, il n’a pas peur de renverser la table si besoin, ni de déplaire. On l’aime pour ce qu’il est, ou on le rejette entièrement. En plus de ses propos assumés, il a une véritable prestance, un charisme. Pour tout cela, il représente un électrochoc pour la vie politique française. En soutenant Donald Trump, nous revendiquons avant tout notre envie d’avoir un homme politique de cette trempe en France.
Selon vous, il n’existe donc pas un Donald Trump français à l’heure actuelle?
À certains égards, il y a Jean-Marie Le Pen qui n’a pas peur de dire ce qu’il pense. Robert Ménard fait également la quasi-unanimité chez les soutiens de Donald Trump en ce qu’il représente un courant anti-système. Philippe de Villiers pourrait également s’en rapprocher.
Vous reconnaissez-vous dans un parti politique français?
Clairement, non. Nous ne soutenons pas Les Républicains, ni le Front national. Nous sommes avant tout des déçus de la politique telle qu’elle est pratiquée en France. On soutient Donald Trump pour changer cela. Mais la question n’est pas d’importer les États-Unis en France, il s’agit simplement de profiter de la montée de Donald Trump pour changer les choses chez nous. Les Français sont prêts à avoir un Trump à l’Élysée, j’en suis convaincu, mais il devra être assez solide pour ne pas renoncer à ses principes au nom d’une certaine bien pensance. Il ne doit pas avoir peur de mettre les pieds dans le plat.
Pensez-vous que s’il était élu président, l’arrivée de Donald Trump à la Maison-Blanche influerait sur la vie politique française?
Je le pense oui. Cela entraînerait un tremblement de terre chez nous. Les politiques pourraient enfin dire ce qu’ils pensent réellement et lâcher la bride. Actuellement, il y a une chappe de plomb morale au-dessus d’eux, notamment en raison du poids des médias, qui les empêche d’affirmer de réelles prises de position qui permettraient à la France d’avancer dans la bonne direction. Le plus important pour nous est qu’il ne devrait pas y avoir de sujets tabous en France, notamment en ce qui concerne l’avortement ou l’immigration.
N’avez-vous pas peur que s’il parvient à être élu président des États-Unis, Donald Trump ne puisse pas réaliser son programme, comme prédisent ceux qui le qualifient de «populiste» ou de «démagogue»?
Je ne peux pas savoir si Donald Trump réalisera son programme une fois arrivé à la Maison-Blanche. Je pense que s’il est élu, il y aura quand même des changements radicaux, notamment en matière de politique étrangère. Cela commencerait par un rapprochement avec la Russie de Vladimir Poutine, puis une véritable guerre contre l’État islamique. Quoiqu’il arrive je préfère voir un Donald Trump qui n’applique pas son programme à la Maison-Blanche, qu’une Hillary Clinton qui respecte ses engagements électoraux. Dans ce cas-là, c’en sera fini des États-Unis.
Voir également:
À islam radical, mesures radicales
Cyril Bennasar
Causeur
2 février 2016
En politique, j’ai pris l’habitude de me méfier de ceux qui rassurent l’opinion pour m’intéresser à ceux qui l’inquiètent. Souvent dans l’histoire de France, les visionnaires excentriques ont concentré les méfiances et les moqueries pendant que les gestionnaires à courte vue ramassaient les suffrages. On se souvient qu’en juin 1940, Pétain était plus acclamé que de Gaulle, qu’en 2002, Jacques Chirac mit le pays dans sa poche face à Jean-Marie Le Pen et, comme on n’apprend jamais rien, il se pourrait qu’en 2017, les mêmes trouilles et les mêmes paresses nous condamnent à perdre cinq longues années avec Alain Juppé. La tentation du centre est le recours des Français qui ne comprennent rien et qui ont peur de tout, de ceux qui préfèrent s’endormir avec Alain Duhamel plutôt que réfléchir avec Alain Finkielkraut.
Les Américains, qui ont de l’audace dans les gènes et le goût de l’aventure, placent aujourd’hui Donald Trump en tête dans les sondages pour l’investiture républicaine. Ça fait beaucoup rire au Petit Journal. C’est bon signe mais jusqu’à présent, ça ne suffisait pas à me convaincre que le type était taillé pour le job. Au début de sa campagne, je n’avais pas aimé toutes ses déclarations. Surtout celles qui généralisent. Même si je n’ai aucun mal à croire qu’un peuple venu du Sud sans qu’on l’ait invité soit surreprésenté dans les prisons pour des affaires de drogue, de crimes et de viols, on ne doit pas dire : « Les » Mexicains. Il faut dire : « Des » Mexicains.
Je n’avais pas aimé non plus ses propos à l’adresse d’Hillary Clinton, lui reprochant de n’avoir pas su satisfaire son mari. Il faut être ignorant pour avancer cela. Et grossier. Nous ne trompons pas nos femmes parce qu’elles ne réveillent plus nos désirs, mais parce que nous avons de l’audace dans les gènes et le goût de l’aventure.
Or l’ignorance et la grossièreté sont trop répandues pour faire sortir du lot un candidat à la candidature suprême, même pour celui qui ambitionnerait de ne devenir qu’un président normal. Quand on promet de « make América great again », on ne peut pas être so far away des grandes figures qui ont fait l’Amérique. Même sans états d’âme avec les Mexicains et sans retenue contre les Indiens, le cow-boy savait rester un gentleman. Jamais John Wayne n’aurait laissé une dame marcher dans la boue en descendant de la diligence. Évidemment, ni dans Alamo ni dans La Chevauchée fantastique, les femmes ne se présentent aux élections pour être shérif à la place du shérif. Mais ce n’est pas une raison pour perdre son sang-froid, et un futur président devrait savoir que l’héroïsme s’arrête là où l’égalité commence.
Le terroriste est souvent un ex-voisin modèle
Je n’avais pas aimé non plus sa critique des interventions militaires menées par ses prédécesseurs, en particulier les regrettés George Bush. Comme il est facile aujourd’hui de condamner ces idéalistes, qui ont surtout péché par excès d’occidentalo-morphisme, prêtant à ces populations des aspirations démocratiques, des soifs de liberté et des rêves de paix. Peut-être eût-il fallu ne remplir que la première partie des missions, en Afghanistan comme en Irak, en éliminant massivement tout ennemi avéré et, par précaution, supposé, et en renonçant à la seconde qui ambitionnait de faire des survivants des démocrates. Peut-être eût-il fallu entendre ce général russe qui, au xixe siècle disait déjà que « L’Afghanistan ne peut être conquis, et qu’il ne le mérite pas. » Mais qui donc avait prévu que, dans le monde arabe, les alternatives aux tyrannies se révéleraient bien pires que les régimes autoritaires abattus, et que les printemps libéreraient surtout les islamismes ? En tout cas, pas ceux qui aujourd’hui rivalisent de sévérité pour condamner les erreurs passées de leurs adversaires.
Voilà pourquoi j’étais réservé sur l’opportunité de donner le poste à Donald Trump car il ne suffit pas, pour faire un bon président, d’effaroucher les bien-pensants, même si c’est une condition incontournable, ou d’avoir raison après tout le monde. Et puis est venue cette idée, peut-être devenue promesse depuis la publication de cet article, de ne plus laisser entrer les musulmans sur le sol des États-Unis. Je sais bien qu’il ne faut pas dire « les », il faut dire « des », j’ai compris la leçon. Oui, mais alors lesquels ? Telle est la question que Donald rétorque à nos indignations. Avant que des musulmans balancent des avions dans des tours ou que d’autres flinguent des handicapés, les uns comme les autres étaient de paisibles citoyens, des voisins sans histoires, des étudiants appréciés, ou des travailleurs honnêtes, car on ne peut, au pays de la troisième récidive et de la peine de mort, devenir terroriste après avoir fait carrière dans le banditisme. Comment faire, donc, pour distinguer les terroristes musulmans parmi les musulmans ? Et que faire si la mission s’avère impossible ? C’est en posant ces questions, que devrait se poser tout responsable politique qui s’est penché sur le vrai sens des mots « responsable » et « politique », que Donald est remonté dans mon estime. C’est en opposant à la liberté de circulation le principe de précaution (surtout utilisé pour nous empêcher de vivre libres, et qui pourrait bien, en l’occurrence, nous empêcher de mourir jeunes), qu’il est devenu mon candidat.
Vers un maccarthysme antidjihad ?
La solution est radicale, entière, brutale, américaine et nous paraît folle, comme tout ce qui nous vient d’outre-Atlantique avec vingt ans d’avance, pour nous apparaître comme moderne, vingt ans après. Ainsi, les Américains ont fermé, au temps de la guerre froide, leur pays au communisme. On se souvient du maccarthysme et des questions risibles posées par les douaniers aux nouveaux arrivants, immigrés ou touristes : Appartenez-vous au crime organisé ? Êtes-vous membre du parti communiste ? Ils ont su, sous la réprobation du monde entier, éviter d’être contaminés par cette maladie du xxe siècle. Nous avons eu, en France et en Europe, une autre approche. Nous avons fait le pari que cette idéologie dangereuse et liberticide se dissoudrait dans la démocratie et dans l’économie de marché. Et nous avons gagné. Chez nous, il ne reste du communisme qu’un parti crépusculaire et folklorique, une curiosité européenne où se retrouvent des écrivains chics, idiots utiles du village souverainiste – utiles à qui, on se le demande ? On les lit avec bonheur quand ils ne parlent pas de politique.
Mais alors deux questions se posent : le monde libre aura-t-il raison de l’islamisme comme il a eu raison du communisme ? Pouvons-nous attendre vingt ans pour le savoir ?
Voir par ailleurs:
Al Qaeda Makes a Comeback
Ken Dilanian
NBC
Feb. 26, 201
Intelligence analysts paid close attention last month when al Qaeda’s master bombmaker, Ibrahim al Asiri — whose name tops U.S. kill lists — issued an audiotape from his hiding place.
The content was the usual anti-Saudi Arabian screed, sprinkled with threats against America — but the news was Asiri’s sudden willingness to join the terror group’s PR campaign. For years, the man who tried to take down planes with underwear and parcel bombs had laid low, as al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate tried to protect him from U.S. drone strikes.
In 2016, however, a resurgent al Qaeda is emerging from the shadows. While ISIS has been soaking up headlines, its older sibling has been launching attacks and grabbing territory too, and U.S. intelligence officials tell NBC News they are increasingly concerned the older terror group is poised to build on its achievements.
« Al Qaeda affiliates are positioned to make gains in 2016, » James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, warned the House Intelligence Committee Thursday.
Because of those far-flung affiliates, al Qaeda « remains a serious threat to U.S. interests worldwide, » Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress recently.
FROM OCT. 19, 2015: Senior al Qaeda leader Sanafi al-Nasr killed in US airstrike1:19
After seizing a large segment of Iraq and Syria, beheading Western hostages on camera and slaughtering civilians in the heart of Paris, ISIS has eclipsed its extremist rival as the biggest brand in global jihad.
But U.S. officials tell NBC News that al Qaeda — though its core in Pakistan has been degraded by years of CIA drone strikes — is now experiencing renewed strength through its affiliates, led by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen and the Nusra Front in Syria. Clapper called the two groups al Qaeda’s « most capable » affiliates in his House testimony Thursday.
Both branches have expanded their territorial holdings over the last year amid civil wars. Russian air strikes against the Nusra Front, and CIA drone attacks on AQAP leaders, have set them back, but have not come close to destroying them.
Al Qaeda has not managed to attack a Western target recently, but it continues to inspire plots. There is no evidence December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California was directed by al Qaeda, but Syed Rizwan Farook, who carried out the attack with his wife Tashfeen Malik, appears to have been radicalized by al Qaeda long before the rise of ISIS. He was a consumer of videos by al Qaeda’s Somalia affiliate and the AQAP preacher Anwar al Awlaki, court records show.
Al Qaeda attacks on hotels in Burkina Faso in January and Mali in November, which together killed dozens of people, appeared to affirm the threat posed by the terror group’s Saharan branch, al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb, or AQIM.
Stewart added that intelligence officials are also « concerned al Qaeda could reestablish a significant presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if regional counterterrorism pressure deceases. »
In Yemen, AQAP has benefitted from the power vacuum created by the Houthi rebels’ uprising, and the air war on the Houthis by Saudi Arabia.
AQAP last April seized the city of Mukalla, the capital of Hadramout province and a port city with a population of some 300,000. It looted a bank of more than $1 million in cash, U.S. officials said, and released 300 inmates from jail.
Since then, the group has expanded its territory in the provinces of Abyan and Shabwa, its traditional strongholds.
« AQAP’s expansion is unchecked because there is no one on the ground to put any pressure on the organization, » noted Geoffrey Johnsen, a Yemen expert. « What is left of Yemen’s military is too busy fighting other enemies to engage AQAP, and the Saudis are focused on rolling back the Houthis. In the midst of Yemen’s civil war, AQAP is able to pursue more territory and to plot, plan, and launch attacks. »
The CIA is watching closely. Jalal Bala’idi, a prominent AQAP field commander, was killed in an agency drone strike in February.
AQAP’s seizures of territory have « allowed them to operate more openly, have access to a port, and have access to other kinds of infrastructure that has certainly benefitted them, » a U.S. intelligence official told NBC News. At the same time, he said, the U.S. has « managed to remove many significant figures from the battlefield and keep AQAP somewhat at bay. »
Al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate gets less public attention than others. Western media reporting sometimes refers to the Nusra front as a Syrian rebel group, without mentioning that it’s part of the global terrorism organization.
But Nusra is as well-organized and disciplined as any al Qaeda affiliate, U.S. intelligence officials say. Although it is now focused on defeating Assad, its battle tested fighters could pose a risk to the West in the years ahead.
« Jabhat al Nusra is a core component of the al Qaeda network and probably poses the most dangerous threat to the U.S. from al Qaeda in the coming years, » the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report. « Al Qaeda is pursuing phased, gradual, and sophisticated strategies that favor letting ISIS attract the attention — and attacks — of the West while it builds the human infrastructure to support and sustain major gains in the future and for the long term. »
U.S. air strikes have set back a group of al Qaeda operatives in Syria known as the Khorasan Group, which embedded with Nusra while plotting attacks against the West, intelligence officials say.
But Nusra has trained a core of elite fighters, the ISW says. Georgetown terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman says Nusra has achieved Osama bin Laden’s goal of rebranding al Qaeda and moving away from a name that had lost its luster.
The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al Julani, is hardly a household name in the West, but he is respected by his adversaries in American intelligence. He is believed to have been detained by the U.S. military in Iraq and released in 2008.
Hoffman, who served as the CIA’s Scholar-in-Residence for Counterterrorism, calls Nusra « even more dangerous and capable than ISIS. »
Al Qaeda is watching ISIS « take all the heat and absorb all the blows while al Qaeda quietly re-builds its military strength, » he said.
Voir enfin:
The Tough Choices of Overseas Intervention
The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban.
As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then abruptly left the targeted country, chaos has followed. But when America has followed up its use of force with unpopular peacekeeping, sometimes American interventions have led to something better.
The belated entry of the United States into World War I saved the sinking Allied cause in 1917. Yet after the November 1918 armistice, the United States abruptly went home, washed its hands of Europe’s perennial squabbling and disarmed. A far bloodier World War II followed just two decades later.
It may have been wise or foolish for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to have intervened in Vietnam in 1963-1964 to try to save the beleaguered non-communist south. But after 10 years of hard fighting and a costly stalemate, it was nihilistic for America to abandon a viable South Vietnam to invading communist North Vietnam. Re-education camps, mass executions and boat people followed — along with more than 40 years of communist oppression.
The current presidential candidates are refighting the Iraq war of 2003. Yet the critical question 13 years later is not so much whether the United States should or should not have removed the genocidal Saddam Hussein, but whether our costly efforts at reconstruction ever offered any hope of a stable Iraq.
By 2011, Iraq certainly seemed viable. Only a few dozen American peacekeepers were killed in Iraq in 2011 — a total comparable to the number of U.S. soldiers who die in accidents in an average month.
The complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops in December 2011 abruptly turned what President Obama had dubbed a « sovereign, stable and self-reliant » Iraq — and what Vice President Joe Biden had called one of the administration’s « greatest achievements » — into a nightmarish wasteland.
Hillary Clinton bragged of the 2011 airstrikes in Libya and the eventual death of Gadhafi: « We came, we saw, he died. »
But destroying Gadhafi’s forces from the air and then abandoning Libya to terrorists and criminals only created an Islamic State recruiting ground. The Benghazi disaster was the nearly inevitable result of washing our hands of the disorder that we had helped to create.
In contrast, when the United States did not pack up and go home after its messy wars, our unpopular interventions often helped make life far better for all involved — and the U.S. and its allies more secure.
The United States inherited a mess in the Philippines in 1899 after the defeat of imperial Spain in the Spanish-American war. But after more than a decade of bloody counterinsurgency fighting, America finally birthed a Philippine national government that was given its independence after World War II.
President Harry Truman’s intervention to save South Korea from North Korean aggression quickly turned into a quagmire. Communist China soon launched a massive invasion into the Korean peninsula. By 1953 — at a cost of roughly 35,000 American lives, about eight times more U.S. fatalities than in Iraq — America had at least saved a viable South Korea.
President Eisenhower, facing re-election in 1956, resisted calls to pull American peacekeepers from the Demilitarized Zone and quit the detested « Truman’s war. »
More than 60 years after the U.S. saved South Korea, thousands of American peacekeepers still help protect a democratic and successful south from a nightmarish, totalitarian and nuclear north.
Some 60 million people died in World War II, a global war that the United States did not start and did not enter until 1941. Yet American power helped defeat the Axis aggressors.
Unlike the aftermath of World War I, the United States stayed on to help rebuild war-torn Europe and Asia after World War II. The Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, the defeat of Soviet Union in the Cold War, the foundations of the later European Union, and Asian economic dynamism all followed — along with some 70 years of relative peace.
In 1999, President Clinton convinced the NATO alliance to bomb Serbia’s genocidal Slobodan Milosevic out of power and stop the mass killing in the Balkans. After Milosevic’s removal, only the presence of American-led NATO peacekeepers on the ground prevented another round of mass murder.
Donald Trump has rightly reminded us during his campaign that Americans are sick and tired of costly overseas interventions. But what Trump forgets is that too often the world does not always enjoy a clear choice between good and bad, wise and stupid. Often the dilemma is the terrible choice between ignoring mass murderer, as in Rwanda or Syria; bombing and leaving utter chaos, as in Libya; and removing monsters, then enduring the long ordeal of trying to leave something better, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The choices are all awful. But the idea that America can bomb a rogue regime, leave and expect something better is pure fantasy.