Phil Gordon remembers March 19, 2011 very well. That day, he was at the Elysee Hillary Clinton, then head of American diplomacy, of which he was a collaborator. "We enter the Elysée, he says nine years later, and Sarkozy announces that French planes have started to bomb Libya. "
Good prince, the French president offers the Obama administration the possibility of opposing this operation. "Obviously, we couldn't oppose it", explains the former American official: it was, after all, about avoiding a massacre of civilians in Benghazi by the forces of Colonel Gaddafi; a resolution to that effect had been adopted two days earlier by the United Nations Security Council.
But in operational terms, that day, the United States was put "Before the fait accompli". The Libyan operation was to become the first foreign intervention that the Americans would then claim to have "Run from behind", leaving the Europeans " take the lead ", according to an expression made famous by an article in the New Yorker.
It was another era – another world: the pre-Trump world, in which Americans and Europeans worked together, relatively easily. Is that era definitely over, or can it return if Donald Trump is kicked out of the White House on November 3?
Successive failures
Phil Gordon today supports Joe Biden's campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidential election, after having participated in that of Kamala Harris for the primaries, then that of Pete Buttigieg, two candidates who withdrew from the race . He has just finished a book, to be published in June in the United States and of which he presented the thesis, Monday March 9, at the University Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, within the framework of the chair "Great contemporary strategic challenges ": Losing the Long Game ("Lose in length", St. Martin’s Press, not translated).
This book, which has the subtitle "The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle-East" ("The false promise of regime change in the Middle East"), learns from the successive failures of US external interventions in the Arab-Muslim world aimed at changing the regime in place, since the overthrow of the Iranian Prime Minister , Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, orchestrated by the CIA, until the invasion of Iraq, in 2003.
