Renaud Lassus is a senior government official in the French department of the treasury. He spent five years in Washington, at the beginning of the 2000s, before returning there in 2015 as Minister Counselor for Economic Affairs to the Embassy of France in the United States in the autumn of 2015, working with Gérard Araud then Philippe Étienne.
Despite the disturbing spectacle of a society wracked by numerous “weaknesses,” as revealed by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the author manages to convince us that a renewal of America is taking place across the Atlantic. Beyond the risk of a paralysis of the federal government, new ideas are coming out of political, economic, and technological arenas on the state and local levels, founded on traditional factors of the resilience of American democracy, from the reform of capitalism to a return to the social idea.
There are “new frontiers” in the face of scientific and climate challenges, which America must take into account to respond to this “crisis of the human” that the author reveals brilliantly to us. This is both a lucid and optimistic look at the future of America, in the great tradition of French observers of America since Tocqueville.