“Perhaps we were too naive”
by digby
Today’s New York Times has a couple of must-read articles on the revelations of wiretaps on European leaders. This one, a straight news story, about the anger amongst the Europeans is kind of sad:
The disclosures contained in the documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have crystallized a growing sense in Europe that post-Sept. 11 America has lost some of the values of privacy and accountability that have been the source of the world’s admiration for its version of democracy.
So fierce was the anger in Berlin over suspicions that American intelligence had tapped into Ms. Merkel’s cellphone that Elmar Brok of Germany, the chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a pillar of trans-Atlantic exchanges since 1984, spoke Friday of America’s security establishment as a creepy “state within a state.”
Since Sept. 11, 2001, he said, “the balance between freedom and security has been lost.”
[…]
Germany, basically a post-World War II creation of the United States and its allies, is much less accustomed to such lecturing, with Germans to this day frequently referring to the United States as their country’s school for democracy.Now, said Guntram Wulff, director of Breugel, a policy organization in Brussels, “the students are calling the teacher,” reminding the Obama administration of democratic values.
That the call came from a German chancellor who was raised in Communist East Germany, and thus has personal familiarity with government spying, heightened the irony and the bitterness.
[…]
Yet, even united, the Europeans often feel like bystanders, powerless to stop the dithering or insensitivity of their partner, the world’s No. 1 power. Threats to halt talks on a trans-Atlantic trade deal that would create a free market of about 800 million people in Europe and the United States are empty, since the deal would produce much needed growth and create jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.That mutual dependence has kept the old couple together for decades. But many analysts warn that the younger generation may be far more fickle. The old-guard Atlanticists who nurtured modern Germany knew war, or cold war and division. A year of study in America constituted their discovery of the world.
Today’s young Europeans can go anywhere, and glean information from all sorts of sources. A job in Shanghai, Singapore or India is seen as little different from one in Los Angeles or New York, Ms. Heuser said. Meanwhile, in the United States Congress, there are fewer and fewer young members with foreign experience, something once gained, in many cases, by military service.
After this week, the older European generation is wondering about the marriage, too. “America has always been about freedom and a guarantor for freedom,” said Mr. Brok, bitterly. “Perhaps we were too naïve.”
He sets off on Sunday on his latest trip to Washington and glimpse of a security machine that he suggested is so drowning in data that it misses valuable clues, like the Russian warning about the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombings.
“In China, I expect such behavior,” he said. But, from America, “this is real disappointment.”
Those older Europeans thought we lived by a different set of rules than other powerful nations, but in the end we’re just like everybody else. That’s sad for them and sad for us.
All I see on TV are gobsmacked Americans wondering why in the world it’s even considered bad manners, much less a betrayal, for the American government to spy on their allies on behalf of —well, who knows what? “The American people?” (I really doubt that bugging Angela Merkel’s personal phone or spying on Brazil’s oil company accrues to the average citizens’ benefit.)But in this news analysis, David Sanger writes that the very blase excuse we see coming from just about everyone — “they all do it” — doesn’t really carry water when you are the most powerful nation on earth with capabilities beyond the wildest dreams of anyone else. It’s even worse when your allies have entrusted much of their own potential defensive capabilities to you and you abuse that trust by treating them like enemies.
The US desired hegemonic military power after WWII and was able to get it as its allies were mired in the rubble of the war and its enemies in misguided ideology. The Europeans and others gave up any pretentions to military greatness and trusted the US as their proxy. It was an unusually placid relationship for a group of nations that had spent thousands of years fighting each other and anyone who came near them. I supposed it’s unsurprising that this relationship would fray over time, particularly once their mutual enemy, the Soviet Union, broke up. But this trust has been vital in the post war peace and it’s a shame to see the US take it for granted. But it did more than that. It started acting irrationally.
During the run up to the Iraq invasion and later with the torture revelations I wondered when the worm was going to turn and our behavior would finally turn most countries from allies and respectful economic competitors to mistrustful potential enemies. What happens when a powerful nation becomes a rogue superpower, out of control and beyond normal restraint? When its political system becomes so dysfunctional that cranks and fools are able to bring the world economy to the brink of crisis repeatedly, for bizarre goals which even they know are unattainable? How can we expect our allies to respond when the new administration that promised to reverse this behavior is obviously incapable of stopping the paranoid fringe in the government? And even worse, when it is also revealed to have not only failed to restrain the clandestine spying and aggressive cyberwarfare planning that began under its loathed predecessor but actively expanded it, targeting its friends and foes alike? What are they supposed to think?
When a nation is as powerful as the US it is inevitable that it will inspire some combination of loathing, fear, respect and trust. In most of the post war period the US has had far more friends who respected and trusted it than loathed and feared it, despite the fact that its respect and trust was often unearned and undeserved. That may be changing now and I don’t think Americans should be so dismissive. We are not going to like living in a world in which everyone sees the United States as dangerous and threatening.
Here’s the livestream of the anti-spying rally in DC today: