Haiti is in America

No offense to Alain Joyandet, secretary of State for Development Cooperation, but he does not pull the same amount of weight as Hillary Clinton, secretary of State, period. If we had to judge the respective degrees of involvement of France and the United States, it would be sufficient to compare the visit to Port-au-Prince of Mrs. Clinton, the most important American government official after Obama, to that of a rather inconspicuous French government official: the Americans’ involvement is on a much higher level.

Hillary Clinton declared that the United States will be there for Haitians “today, tomorrow, and in the future.” We can take her word for it. America has taken the little Caribbean country by the hand as it strives to bury its dead and to save the survivors since last Tuesday’s earthquake and, to put it bluntly, there is nothing shocking about that. History, geography, human ties, geopolitics and good old politics: everything supports an American intervention. Since its inception in 1823, the Monroe doctrine has remained the bedrock of Washington’s diplomacy and can be quickly summarized: the Western hemisphere is America’s business. Their military or political interventions in Haitian affairs, for better and often for worse, have been constant. The U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay is quite close to Haiti and more than half a million Haitians live in the United States (there are 10 times fewer in France).

The Haitian drama allows Obama to both show that America’s force can be used wisely and to aid the first black republic in history. On Friday, the three most recent American presidents jointly declared their willingness to help Haiti reconstruct itself, and this was a strong image. By the way, since last May, Bill Clinton has been the United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti where, as his wife noted on CNN, they spent their honeymoon. The French, overwhelmed by the suffering of the Haitians to whom they feel so close due to language and culture, are forced to see that they are largely out of the game.