The US refusal to intervene in Syria in 2013: A French trauma
In 2002, the American political scientist Robert Kagan published a lengthy essay in the conservative journal Policy Review, titled "Power and Weakness," challenging the Western orthodoxy that Europe and the United States shared the same worldview. Nothing could be further from the truth at the dawn of the 21 st century, Kagan argued: Europe had turned away from military power. It had entered a "post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant's Perpetual Peace." On the other hand, the US, rooted in history, exercises "power in the anarchic Hobbesian world" where security "depend[s] on the possession and use of military might." In short, he concluded, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus."
Kagan's thesis, expanded the following year into a book translated into 25 languages, captivated readers as much as Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" theory did after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yet 10 years later, in 2013, some wondered if the roles had not been reversed, when Washington abandoned France in the middle of nowhere. On August 31, as the French and Americans prepared to carry out joint airstrikes on Syrian military targets to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people, President Barack Obama backed down, forcing the French military to call off an operation it could not conduct alone.
A wound that has not fully healed
By his own admission, it is the worst memory François Hollande has of his presidency. The story of those three fateful days has been thoroughly documented, including in the pages of Le Monde. Hollande still speaks of the episode today, describing it as a wound that has not fully healed. Among France's foreign policy elite, Obama's abandonment of Syria is remembered as a kind of trauma. Over time, and with the evolution of US policy, it has come to be seen above all as a turning point that subsequent events have only confirmed: From that moment on, Europe could no longer count on the US to play the role of the world's "policeman."
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