A good German counterpoint to yesterday’s article from the Berliner Zeitung headlined U.S. Assault on Assange Betrays America’s Founding Principles is this article from Die Welt, headlined WikiLeaks Threat to America is Nothing for Europe to Snicker About by columnist Thomas Kielinger.
Kielinger warns readers that to encourage and support organizations that undermine U.S. power and credibility like WikiLeaks is tantamount to undermining European security.
For Die Welt, Thomas Kielinger writes in part:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has contracted a case of megalomania. He resembles the villain Blofeld from the James Bond films. “A new world will emerge, in which history will be rewritten,” he has proclaimed for some time now. This is a new version of the “grab for world dominance,” and it is being made by someone who, from the moment his latest revelations were released, has boasted that he would unmask the American “empire,” for it to be pilloried and to expose its sinister machinations. Seldom has someone’s alleged attempt to achieve “world happiness” been so transparently unmasked as it has in this case.
True, he relies on the fact that this type of cheap voyeurism and tongue clucking about everything America fails to achieve might have become fashionable here and in many parts of the world, even as the capacity to assess current events further declines. There is a growing addiction to trivializing ourselves and our friends from the other side of the Atlantic. “You just wait and see what we think of you,” is how one unnamed foreign leader dismissed apologetic remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. One didn’t have to “wait and see” for long. It’s easy enough to imagine – or read the relevant editorials. But these recent WikiLeaks revelations are in line with developments that have led to a diminished capacity to correctly interpret what America means to our collective security.
Assange has recognized the vulnerabilities of the U.S. and the West: This is no different from international terrorism, which draws considerable strength from our collective despair and defeatism. Assange understands America’s psychology at the beginning of the 21st century -and just how dramatically it has changed since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We are witnessing a massive U-turn in the self-assessment of a proud nation and it’s sense of invulnerability, which prevailed in practice until 2001, but has given way to goose bumps over this ubiquitous threat. We’ve left behind the “American Century”, which is how the great publisher Henry Luce once described the 20th, and find ourselves in the century of “Anything Goes,” with new threats emerging around the world and unanswered questions about how to reduce them. The old policy of “containment” worked well and according to agreed-upon rules. The weapons used against technologically-savvy terrorists have yet to be forged. The peaceful sleep of the unthreatened has given way to the insomnia of the threatened.
For continuing global coverage of the WikiLeaks disclosures, READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
