Five months have passed and my letter of America ends

Five months have passed and my letter of America ends. Here comes the time of a first and very preliminary balance sheet. I take three main lessons of my short but intense stay:

essentially, Barack Obama did not disappoint the majority of Americans who made him trust;

cannot, of course, underestimating the capabilities of America rebound, but his condition is more worrying that you think generally;

Finally, and this is a troubling finding to a European, Europe no longer, or if, in the eyes of America.

Of course, the popularity of Barack Obama is undermined in those months; recently, many have been those in the United States who have supported his desire to close Guantanamo, nor understood the importance of its financial support to the automotive industry. Yet, in spite of the rise of unemployment and the worsening of the debt, a significant majority of Americans (more than 55) trust Barack Obama, whereas its willingness to tackle all problems at a time is legitimate.

In fact, behind this "all-out" activism, the President of the United States has set two priority objectives almost as difficult to achieve one than the other: the reform of the health and social protection within the system; the Middle East, and priority outside Israel-Palestine conflict. If there is a President who reconciles in his person the intellectual qualities and political pragmatism of the founding fathers of the American Republic, it is Barack Obama. It is the paradox and the strength of America have known and could bring to the Presidency this "Tiger Woods" of the policy, more closely in its references to the "aristocrats" who founded America that although "heirs" of the system, starting with its immediate predecessor. These exceptional qualities will suffice It is permissible to doubt.

The challenges are immense. America is not evil, it is very wrong. Beyond the amount astronomical debt, under its various incarnations, budgetary, commercial, beyond the State of its infrastructure when will be the disaster that will cause America to finally take the necessary steps to have bridges, tracks... worthy of a modern State signs of decline multiply, the scourge of obesity is the most visible sign. America has the means to recover She wished to "Europeanise" its system of social protection, legitimate and necessary ambition, but "Europeanisation" of America will translate not rather decline relative, but inevitable, its economic weight in the world by the humanization of capitalism

This Europe of which it may be closer in a process of collective decline of the West America chooses to ignore it in almost total way. Between threats in the Middle East, the challenges of Asia, the novelty of Africa, the proximity of Latin America and Central America, the discovery of the importance and urgency of environmental issues, it seems more to be boxes in the brains of Americans for the old Continent, which many now is more derived. While humiliating finding, but that may be beneficial, if it grows the Europeans to respond. Etudiant at Harvard in the 1970s, in a deeply divided between supporters and opponents of the war of the Viet Nam, I I had felt for the first time along the Charles River, long walks with German students.

Returning in America, for a period of time significant nearly forty years later, to my surprise is not so much the energy of America that struck me as the depth of the collective crisis in the whole of the Western world. Of course, even if the two sides of the Atlantic appear to now less United by a common ambition by a common doubt on their fate, their place and their role in the world, there is more energy and collective hope in America. But there is more suffering also.

America can recover with Obama, but he was not sure that it gets even with Obama.