Liberté ou autocratie, le dilemme

Le mandat du président Trump qui, sauf miracle, s’achève en janvier 2021, avait soumis à rude épreuve les alliances des Etats-Unis d’Amérique avec plusieurs pays et entités européens et asiatiques. Plusieurs de ces alliés stratégiques des Etats-Unis avaient, alors, perdu confiance en l’esprit de solidarité qui a toujours empreint l’action étasunienne à leur égard, et amorcé des réflexions sur la construction de leurs propres systèmes de défense. L’arrivée à la Maison Blanche d’un no ...

Whether President Trump is reelected or not, the United States will, sooner or later, revert to a traditonalist foreign policy of openness and alliances. If Joe Biden beats Donald Trump on November 3, as he is expected to do, the United States will return to a traditionalist brand of foreign policy: one of openness, support for multilateralism, and constructive engagement with allies. But even if Biden doesn’t winwhich is possible—and four more years of Trump’s America First polici ...

Bank robbers are now and then caught because banks, insurance companies, or robbed personalities promise rewards for the arrest of criminals. In the past, Hollywood took the lead in dreaming up such scenarios. But in early August, the U.S. State Department offered a $10 million reward for information leading “to the identification or location of any person, who works with or for a foreign government for the purpose of interfering with U.S. elections through certain illegal cyber act ...

At the beginning of June, officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, usually active on America’s periphery, were deployed to Washington D.C., where President Donald Trump had sighted an internal threat posed by “anarchists, agitators, looters, or lowlifes”. In reality, American citizens were protesting, mostly peacefully, against police brutality, and the killings of African-Americans by cops. Nevertheless, the urban revolt seemed grave enough for the Trump Administration to ...

The United States has suffered more COVID-19 casualties than any other country and continues to report large numbers of new cases and deaths, and – as evident recently in stock markets – investors remain extremely sensitive to the epidemic’s shifting trends. As every state reopens, including most recently the New York epicenter, the fates of the American economy and of the global economy depend on whether the United States has put the worst of the epidemic behind it, or whether it w ...

Les tensions dans les relations entre les Etats-Unis et la Chine sont un sujet de préoccupation pour le monde. En dépit des quelques ouvertures éphémères, qui donnent parfois espoir à la détente, la tendance de ces derniers temps est plutôt vers l’escalade. Il ne se passe pas un mois, voire une semaine sans qu’actions, déclarations ou positions de l’un des deux pays contre l’autre ne fasse la Une de l’actualité. Des incidents les plus dangereux en Mer de Chine méridionale, aux mesur ...

On February 3, 2003, Colin Powell, U.S. President George Bush’s Secretary of State, informed the United Nations Security Council about secret information collected by the U.S. about Iraq’s weapons of mass destructions. “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions,” he said. There was “no doubt in my mind” that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program, and the invasion of Iraq was urgent and justified, because “the gravity of this ...

The drone strike that claimed the life of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani unmasks the limits of so-called "hybrid" – or "asymmetric" – strategies. These low-intensity military operations, conducted through unofficial paramilitary forces, are supposed to allow a weaker state to gain geopolitical advantages without risking an open war with a stronger one. The idea is to gradually accumulate small tactical victories by capitalizing on more powerful states’ lack of appetite for distant ...