IOuri Orlov, who just passed away at the respectable age of 96, was an actor from the other world. A nuclear physicist, he had served a seven-year sentence in a Soviet labor camp, followed by a sentence of internal exile in Siberia, for having dared to express the eminently subversive idea of a democratization of socialism and defending the rights of man. Ronald Reagan negotiated his release with Moscow in 1986 and received him in the Oval Office, with all the honors due to his struggle.
The United States was then in its role of guardians of the democratic temple and policemen of the world. They had given themselves this role and they had given themselves the means. Western Europe lived happily under this protective shelter.
Another century, other customs: in the Trump era, the United States abandoned this role. When the people of Belarus rise up against their dictator, when the main Russian opponent, Alexei Navalny, is the target of an assassination attempt using military poison, Washington is missing subscribers. When Turkey, a NATO member, attacks other members of NATO, an organization created and dominated by the United States, the White House lets it go. The guard has deserted the temple, the gendarme has returned his cap.
Multilateralism is in crisis, its bodies inoperative
Whose ? No one, and that’s the whole problem. Multilateralism is in crisis, its organs inoperative. Despite itself, Europe is picking up the torch, because it displays these values of democracy and human rights as constitutive of its identity, and because crises are increasing in its immediate environment. But, unlike the United States, it has not given itself the means to play a role that falls to it by default.
Europe is not scary
Clément Beaune, Secretary of State for European Affairs, explains it with passion and conviction in the review Foreign politic : the European Union was not built as a power, it was even built against power, whose outbursts had ravaged the continent. In other words, if it wants to take up the torch, it has to change software – maybe even hard drive. It has neither the institutions, nor the modus operandi, nor the mentality of a gendarme. Worse, it is not perceived as such by others either. The fear of the gendarme, it is said, is the beginning of wisdom. But Europe is not scary.
This is what infuriates Emmanuel Macron when he realizes that the politicians of Beirut have led him by boat and have not progressed one iota to overcome their divisions and form the “Mission government” in which he invested so much time and energy. While the French president denounced pell-mell, Sunday, September 27, to the press, the “Treason”, the ” corruption “ and the “Villainous system” of his Lebanese interlocutors whom he covered with ” shame “, a local analyst, Camille Najm, coldly judged: “Macron is nasty, but he does not have the means for his policy. “
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