Des défis à la tonne: l'administration Obama est-elle dépassée par les évènements?

J'ai souvent mentionné que le Président Obama avait hérité d'une situation particulière en arrivant à la Maison Blanche et et que peu de présidents avant lui avaient fait face à autant d'adversité...

Bel article sur la situation actuelle sur le site du Huffington post:

For decades, the United States has tried to build stability in the region -- and maintain its access to Persian Gulf oil -- with arms sales and military training, including a $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia proposed by the White House last fall.

The upwelling of public demands for political reform, however, have shaken that strategy. If the United States is justified in using force to protect the Libyan rebels, how should it protect the protest movements in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and elsewhere that are being violently crushed by regimes whose security forces are armed and trained by the United States?

That question is especially acute in Bahrain, a tiny monarchy which is a critical strategic anchor for the United States: it hosts the U.S. 5th Fleet and the headquarters of the U.S. naval command for the entire region.

The administration appeared to be caught flat-footed this week as Saudi tanks and 2,000 troops rolled across the causeway into neighboring Bahrain, where Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had hours earlier urged the monarchy to take more than “baby steps" in meeting the demonstrator’s demands for political reform. Instead, the demonstrators were met with gunfire.

The situation in Yemen is equally dicey for American strategists. President Ali Abdullah Saleh has become a key U.S. ally in fighting a terrorist franchise of al Qaeda responsible for dispatching parcel bombs to the United States last fall. As in Bahrain, his regime has refused reform and used force against demonstrators. Where does the United States position itself?

“This is a moment you have to think strategically; how all these fit together," said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior analyst at the Brookings Institution. “You have to do that in foreign policy to avoid being run over by each successive crisis." At the moment, said O’Hanlon, the administration seems “overwhelmed."