In 2002, American political scientist Robert Kagan published in the conservative journal Policy Reviewunder the title Power and Weakness (“Power and weakness”), a long essay taking the opposite view of the Western Doxa according to which Europe and the United States share the same vision of the world. Nothing is more false, at the edge of the XXIe century, he says: Europe has turned away from power. She entered a “Postthistic paradise of peace and relative prosperity, concretization of Kant's perpetual peace”. The United States, on the other hand, bouted on history, “Exercise power in the anarchy of a Hobbesian world” where security “Depends on the possession and use of military force”. In other words, he sums up, “Americans are in March and Europeans are Venus”.
The thesis of Robert Kagan, developed the following year in a book translated into twenty-five languages (Plon, 2003), has seduced as much as that of the “end of history”, by Francis Fukuyama (The end of the story and the last man, Flammarion, 1992), after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Ten years later, however, in 2013, some were able to wonder if the roles had not reversed when Washington abandoned France in the open countryside. On August 31, when French and Americans were preparing to carry out strikes on military sites in Syria jointly to punish Bashar al-Assad for having used chemical weapons against its population, President Barack Obama renounced, forcing the French staff to cancel an operation which he could not carry out alone.
Poorly healed injury
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Source: Lemonde