Here’s more from Spain, where media has jumped head first into the global controversy over surveillance. After years of complaining that Washington had turned its back on Europe, Europeans are steamed that in the form of the eavesdropping NSA, the United States has taken all too much of an interest in the Old Continent. For Spain’s El Pais, columnist Francisco G. Basterra writes that while it doesn’t like everything that motivates U.S. mass surveillance, all Europe really wants is the same arrangement that America has with its English-speaking cousins in Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
For El Pais, Francisco G. Basterra strats out this way:
We in Europe have long complained that the United States hasn’t been listening to us, that we are a dispensable continent, and that we no longer even show up on America’s radar, inundated as it is with blips from the Asia-Pacific. Now we find that they’re not only listening to us, they are spying on us – and on a massive scale. And it does so without feeling obliged to offer us any kind of explanation, never mind actually halting such practices. Behind it all is Obama – he whose praises Europe sung, and the one we believed in because he wasn’t Bush. They control the technology that enables this intrusion for the achievement of political, commercial or economic objectives, under the cover of the battle against global terrorism. They oversee the servers of American companies like Google, Microsoft or Apple. They use America’s “soft power” to control cyberspace, which is the scaffolding of globalization. However, this abuse, warns The New York Times, reduces America’s capacity to influence global affairs by way of example and moral leadership. It took the eavesdropping of Angela Merkel – also known as the “mobile chancellor” due to her extensive and continuous use of her cell phone to govern Germany – to unleash a storm in transatlantic relations.
At stake is confidence in the United States. Obama must weigh whether alienating his citizens from his allies is a promising strategy for enhancing international security. It doesn’t seem like the best way to make friends in time of need, when the Middle East is seething, when the U.S. remains mired in its decision to abandon Afghanistan, and when the Arab Spring is collapsing. Its strategy of an Asia pivot to contain China is still a half-hearted pirouette. The U.S. looks like an absent-minded giant incapable of resolving its primary domestic problem, the budget. It is a superpower that collects taxes as if it were a run-of-the-mill nation – but one that faces colossal expenditures, above all in defense, but also in infrastructure and healthcare, where it suffers shortages that are inadequate for a developed country. Distracted from its alliances, the right attitude would be to mend relations with Iran by controlling its nuclear development without resort to military force, not threatening to attack Syria and thereby inciting its Saudi ally, Egypt and Turkey, all of which now question Washington’s reliability, as do Europeans, given the contempt created by wide-scale eavesdropping. The violation of international law committed with drone attacks, as confirmed by independent observers, is yet another sign of the strange attitude shown by the Obama Administration, which has been exhibiting some rather erratic behavior on the international stage. The United States, having problems managing its partial decline, often behaves awkwardly, still a victim of a self-satisfied arrogance stemming from its supposed exceptional place as the indispensable nation, when in every instance it is becoming less so.
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