Take a Number

October 25, 2013

When I read this caption

“U.S. Has Annoyed and Alienated All of Europe”

on Roger Cohen’s latest column in the New York Times, I was amused. In fairness, that’s not the original caption (“The Handyüberwachung Disaster”) or what Mr. Cohen wrote. What Mr. Cohen wrote in this column about the European furor over U. S. NSA monitoring is:

Pivot to Asia was not supposed to mean leave all Europe peeved.

But all Europe is. The perception here is of a United States where security has trumped liberty, intelligence agencies run amok (vacuuming up data of friend and foe alike), and the once-admired “checks and balances” built into American governance and studied by European schoolchildren have become, at best, secret reviews of secret activities where opposing arguments get no hearing.

My immediate reaction to the caption above was take a number. We’ve annoyed and alienated just about everybody. We’re just sticking to our core competency.

6 comments… add one
  • michael reynolds Link

    Europeans Jealous. That would be the honest headline. Are we really supposed to believe European intelligence agencies wouldn’t do the same if they could? Or perhaps are doing the same right now?

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/100242400/france-is-shocked-shocked-i-tell-you-that-america-would-spy-on-its-allies/

    One of the more interesting nuggets in the WikiLeaks cables was the view of a senior German businessman, Berry Smutny, then head of a satellite company called OHB-Systems. In 2009, he was recorded as saying that France was a bigger danger to Germany than China or Russia when it came to commercial espionage.

    “France is the evil empire in stealing technology, and Germany knows this,” Smutny was quoted as saying in the US diplomatic cable. The American embassy recorded his judgment that French industrial espionage was “so bad that the total damage done to the German economy is greater than that inflicted by China or Russia.”

    And Germany, remember, is France’s closest and most trusted friend, the country with whom Paris has worked hand-in-glove ever since the Elysee Treaty of 1963.

    As for America, France’s espionage efforts are well known. The US intelligence community is know to regard French industrial spying as a threat that ranks below the likes of Russia and China – but not that far below. In 1992, a former CIA director, Stansfield Turner, said: “The French are the most predatory service in the world now that the old Soviet Union is gone.”

    As for Ms. Merkel it’s, what, 2013, 68 years since the fall of the Third Reich and 24 years since the fall of the Stasi state, so. . . nope, still not time for Germans to lecture anyone on anything but the manufacture of fine automobiles.

  • Ben Wolf Link

    Diplomacy is not Obama’s strength.

    Coolness has its price,” Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl wrote in 2010, adding that Obama appeared to have no genuine friend among world leaders. But what for? He has the NSA.

    http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/a-929871.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/link-102513.html

  • Dave Schuler Link

    I don’t think it’s just posturing on their part, Michael. The Germans in particular have much more restrictive privacy laws than we do and have had for decades. Their expectations are considerably different from ours.

  • michael reynolds Link

    Ben:

    That is a really dumb article you linked to. It’s a failure of diplomacy that an American president preferred photo ops at Buchenwald to photo ops in Dresden? Are you familiar with the history those two locations represent? Do you not see why it’d be a lousy idea to have those shots show up side by side in the media? The failure was Merkel’s. She wanted moral equivalency and it was a repugnant attempt.

    And it’s a failure of diplomacy that things are testy with Karzai and Maliki? What? Karzai and Maliki? Our two best buddies?

    And are you really, personally upset that apparently he hasn’t kissed Netanyahu’s ass enough?

  • PD Shaw Link

    Dave, I’m not sure about that last claim. Stewart Baker at the Volokh Conspiracy has written a couple of posts which claims that German privacy laws are less protective.

    http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/19/european-e-mail-privacy-even-worse-thought/

    Not read through this stuff closely, but have shelved it in my brain as Europeans are generally less concerned about _government_ intrusions into privacy.

  • Dave Schuler Link

    Perhaps things have changed but back when I was designing in Europe the legal requirements in the areas of privacy and security were much more stringent in Germany than they are here now.

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