No shock that the US spies on its allies
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Charles de Gaulle, the French Resistance leader and later president of France, was once warned he should not hate his friends more than his enemies. "France," he replied, "has no friends, only interests."
It would be interesting to know how he would have responded had he learned, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently did, that his phone communications had been monitored by an American spy agency. It’s a pretty safe bet that he wouldn't have been surprised.
Merkel probably isn’t either, though she made a public display of objecting to the revelation that for years, the National Security Agency had spied on her, along with more than 30 other foreign leaders.
But the protests should be taken with a grain of salt. Madeleine Albright said the French, of all people, listened in on her phone conversations while she was ambassador to the UN. “This is not a surprise to people,” she said of the latest disclosures.
Bernard Squarcini, who ran the French domestic intelligence service, was equally dismissive: “The agencies know perfectly well that every country spies on its allies.”
It’s not hard to grasp why countries would want to spy on their friends as well as their enemies. If the Obama administration wants to cultivate German or French cooperation on Iran or Syria, it needs all the information it can get about how best to advance that goal. European governments doubtless prefer to get warnings about possible US action at their convenience, not Washington’s.
Nor can these partners forget that they sometimes differ sharply on matters of great moment. The line between ally and adversary is sometimes thin and sometimes movable.
The White House was coy about the charge of eavesdropping on Merkel. But the NSA did deny a report that the president knew about the practice and let it continue.
It would hardly be surprising if the agency had done the surveillance on its own – not because it feared Obama would disapprove but because it wanted to shield him from blame if it became public.
The public exchanges were part of a ritual exercise that seemed to be done mostly for show. Merkel was careful not to get carried away, saying, “I think the most important thing is to find a basis for co-operation in the future.” None of the complaining leaders are likely to refuse the information they routinely get from American intelligence.
Though the various spy agencies may have to back off a bit, at least temporarily, they are not likely to decide that friends don’t snoop on friends. This sort of surveillance, at one level or another, will go on. Governments that want to keep secrets will have to find ways to make their communications more secure. In a dangerous, unpredictable world, no one is going to do it for them.
