ADMISSION AU COLLEGE UNIVERSITAIRE Mercredi 29 juin 2011 ANGLAIS durée de l épreuve : 3h IMPORTANT PARTIE RESERVEE A LA CORRECTION

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1 Coller votre code barre ci-dessous ADMISSION AU COLLEGE UNIVERSITAIRE Mercredi 29 juin 2011 ANGLAIS durée de l épreuve : 3h IMPORTANT Le sujet est paginé de 1 à 4. Veuillez vérifier que vous avez bien toutes les pages. En cas d'anomalie, avertissez le responsable de groupe. Afin de faciliter votre travail sur le texte, vous pouvez ôter soigneusement les pages de l article. Il n est pas nécessaire de rendre l article avec votre copie. Les réponses aux questions ne devront pas excéder l'espace qui leur est réservé. PARTIE RESERVEE A LA CORRECTION Détail des notes Commentaires I. Compréhension du texte /10 II. Essai /10 TOTAL : /20 Note après harmonisation : /20

2 ADMISSION AU COLLEGE UNIVERSITAIRE Mercredi 29 juin 2011 ANGLAIS durée de l épreuve : 3h Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all. Thus Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped Europe s balance of power nearly a century and a half ago. Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity and missed it completely. In Bismarck s case it was not so much God s coattails he caught as the revolutionary wave of mid-19th-century German nationalism. And he did more than catch it; he managed to surf it in a direction of his own choosing. The wave Obama just missed again is the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy. It has surged through the region twice since he was elected: once in Iran in the summer of 2009, the second time right across North Africa, from Tunisia all the way down the Red Sea to Yemen. But the swell has been biggest in Egypt, the Middle East s most populous country. In each case, the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave, Bismarck style, by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail. In the case of Iran, he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. This time around, in Egypt, it was worse. He did both some days exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, other days drawing back and recommending an orderly transition. The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak s cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn t end there. America s two closest friends in the region Israel and Saudi Arabia are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington s failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration s apparent cluelessness. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy. This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth

3 and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues. Yet no president can be expected to be omniscient. That is what advisers are for. The real responsibility for the current strategic vacuum lies not with Obama himself, but with the National Security Council, and in particular with the man who ran it until last October: retired Gen. James L. Jones. The best national-security advisers have combined deep knowledge of international relations with an ability to play the Machiavellian Beltway game, which means competing for the president s ear against the other would-be players in the policymaking process: not only the defense secretary but also the secretary of state and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. No one has ever done this better than Henry Kissinger. But the crucial thing about Kissinger as national-security adviser was not the speed with which he learned the dark arts of interdepartmental turf warfare. It was the skill with which he, in partnership with Richard Nixon, forged a grand strategy for the United States at a time of alarming geopolitical instability. The essence of that strategy was, first, to prioritize (for example, détente with the Soviets before human-rights issues within the U.S.S.R.) and then to exert pressure by deliberately linking key issues. In their hardest task salvaging peace with honor in Indochina by preserving the independence of South Vietnam Nixon and Kissinger ultimately could not succeed. But in the Middle East they were able to eject the Soviets from a position of influence and turn Egypt from a threat into a malleable ally. And their overtures to China exploited the divisions within the Communist bloc, helping to set Beijing on an epoch-making new course of economic openness. The contrast between the foreign policy of the Nixon-Ford years and that of President Jimmy Carter is a stark reminder of how easily foreign policy can founder when there is a failure of strategic thinking. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam. I can think of no more damning indictment of the administration s strategic thinking than this: it never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt. Yet the very essence of rigorous strategic thinking is to devise such a scenario and to think through the best responses to them, preferably two or three moves ahead of actual or potential adversaries. It is only by doing these things ranking priorities and gaming scenarios that a coherent foreign policy can be made. The Israelis have been hard at work doing this. All the president and his NSC team seem to have done is to draft touchy-feely speeches like the one he delivered in Cairo early in his presidency. Grand strategy is all about the necessity of choice. Today, it means choosing between a daunting list of objectives: to resist the spread of radical Islam, to limit Iran s ambition to become dominant in the Middle East, to contain the rise of China as an economic rival, to guard against a Russian reconquista of Eastern Europe and so on. The defining characteristic of Obama s foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in essence, I am not George W. Bush is no substitute for a strategy. NEWSWEEK February 21, 2011

4 I. TEXTUAL COMPREHENSION A/ After reading the text carefully, reply in English and in your own words to the following questions. 1. What are the reasons for the recent foreign policy debacle of the Obama administration? 2. What skills should the best national security advisers have, according to the columnist? 3. Why does the columnist criticize the Obama administration s handling of Egypt s popular revolt? Total I.A /6 pts B/ Give an appropriate English synonym for the following words (synonyms to be used in the context of the text). 1. stark: 2. appalled at: 3. forged: 4. indictment: Total I.B /2 pts 1

5 C/ WRITING EXERCISE: After a brief description, comment on the following graph in English: Sep 30th 2010, by The Economist online Total I.C /2 pts Total I. A+B+C = /10 pts 2

6 II ESSAY. Write a short, well-argued essay in English (two pages) on one of the two subjects below. Circle the number which corresponds to the essay chosen. 1. The wave Obama just missed again is the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy. Discuss. 2. Do you agree that the United States actually needs a grand strategy at this time of geopolitical instability? 3

7 Essai = /10 pts 4