D’après la « RAND » (et blague à part) le régime étasunien est confronté à un gros casse-tête dans sa nouvelle stratégie #MENA : si l’avènement des soulèvements #arabes lui a fait prendre conscience que trop de « #stabilité » (comprendre : aider les #tyrans arabes à brimer leurs #populations) est in fine source d’#instabilité, l’instabilité qui a résulté de la « stabilité » l’amène à soutenir les tyrans dans leur effort à ramener la « stabilité »...
▻http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR600/RR605/RAND_RR605.pdf#page22
Prioritizing Stability over Democracy in MENA
The Arab uprisings that began in 2010 have thrown into stark relief a longstanding dictum governing U.S. conduct in the Arab world— namely, the idea that there is both an inherent tension and a zero- sum relationship between U.S. strategic interests and U.S. support for reform in the region. Moreover, the general assumption has been that the former always takes precedence over the latter.
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In the aftermath of the popular revolutions that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya—not to mention a leadership change in Yemen, some measure of constitutional reform in Morocco, and violent protests in Bahrain and Syria—the United States has sought to emphasize the need to find a “new way of doing business” in the Middle East. Successive policy statements and speeches by U.S. government principals since 2011 have emphasized renewed U.S. support for democracy in the region.
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The idea here is that the Arab uprisings have demonstrated that authoritarian regimes are ultimately unstable because they refuse to be responsive and accountable to populations increasingly unwilling to remain silent. By not initiating processes of political reform now, regional governments increase the likelihood that they will face internal opposition—potentially violent in nature—in the future. It is therefore in the interest of the United States to encourage these countries down the path of democracy before they become increasingly unstable.
The U.S. administration, however, has faced considerable challenges in operationalizing this new approach. Ongoing instability and violence in the region, continued skepticism about U.S. support for democracy and civil society, and a generalized sense that American influence in the Middle East is waning have dampened U.S. government efforts to significantly alter the strategic orientation in the Arab world. But there are also drag effects generated by very real U.S. con- cerns, such as Gulf security imperatives (Iran) and political violence in Sinai and parts of North Africa.
To date, much of the debate about how the United States can influence outcomes in the region has centered on foreign assistance—particularly the sizable amounts of military aid that go to countries such as Egypt and Israel (more than $1 billion per year) and, to a lesser extent, Iraq and Jordan.
While the U.S. Congress has sought to enforce some measure of democratic conditionality over these funds, ongoing regional uncertainties as well as concerns about the structure of U.S. defense contracts with Egypt have twice led the U.S. administration to exercise national security waivers and allow military aid to Egypt to continue flowing despite clear authoritarian actions on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government.5 In July 2013, the same government was overthrown in what was widely perceived as a military coup.
The subsequent violent crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood at the hands of Egypt’s security forces led the United States to first cancel the Bright Star joint military exercises and eventually to suspend several components of U.S. military aid. The controversy and debate surrounding these decisions illustrate the challenges that Washington faces today in calibrating its MENA security cooperation policies. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013, President Obama seemed to summarize the dilemma faced by the United States when he said that the “United States will at times work with governments that do not meet . . . the highest international expectations, but who work with us on our core interests.”