Spies and statecraft

NSA activities are proving to be as damaging to international relations as they are useful in providing intelligence.

The vaulting reach of the American doctrine of exceptionalism may have overstretched itself. The German government has asked the CIA station chief in Germany to leave; giving a signal that enough is enough. German relations with the US dropped to a post-Cold-War low with the revelation that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had tapped the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel, to her very considerable annoyance. US President Barack Obama had moved to damage limitation mode and relations were beginning to improve until the latest revelation that has two German officials arrested on charges of spying for the US. Washington has failed to adequately explain itself; there may be more to come in terms of leaked embarrassments for the US and the diplomatic relationship between two allies is in tatters.

Throwing out the head of station of the CIA is no small matter, and it is generally the ‘pariah states’ such as Iran and North Korea that find themselves on the wrong end of spying allegations. But the US is a serial re-offender when it comes to upsetting its allies. In 1995, the French threw out American officials for spying on its territory, and there have been rumblings of suspicion in the media of other EU states and the UK in the last year.

Since the Merkel phone tap the Germans have been asking a series of questions of the Americans and consistently getting stonewalled. The erosion of trust is now obvious and the activities of the American NSA are proving to be as damaging to international relations as they are — possibly — useful in providing actionable intelligence. President Obama has been made to look foolish by his own intelligence apparatus. States, even friendly ones, spy on one another all the time. All the major powers have vast intelligence gathering organisations. Mostly they manage not to get caught, but the Americans have been found out and are paying the price for their duplicity. As the saying goes, ‘some people never learn’. Quite so.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 12^th, 2014.

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