“The United States keeps trying to restore what is unrestorable – leadership in the world system.” – Immanuel Wallerstein
In yesterday’s post, Merkel’s opinion of Obama revealed, I wrote of the NSA spying on Merkel, the ejection of the CIA’s Berlin station chief, and the souring of the German public on President Obama and the U.S.
Space didn’t permit me to give you details of what has been termed as an “unprecedented breach” in German-U.S. relations. I am posting this sidebar because the U.S. media has failed to give us the inside “skinny.”
President Obama was unwilling to commit to a no-spy agreement with German Chancellor Merkel. While apologizing privately to her, he would not make a public apology. (Charles Dharapak/AP)
“The United States has been stupid and very clumsy,” wrote Immanuel Wallerstein, a senior research scholar at Yale University. “The basic problem is that the United States is, and has been for some time, in geopolitical decline. It doesn’t like this. It doesn’t really accept this. It surely doesn’t know how to handle it, that is minimize the losses to the United States. So it keeps trying to restore the unrestorable – leadership in the world system.”
Wallerstein says Europeans in general, and Merkel and Germany in particular, see the U.S. as a “very unreliable partner.” As they lose trust in the U.S., they wonder if they can really trust Russia. “Today … Germany (Merkel) feels free to criticize openly and even harshly all the powerful nations with which she deals.”
“In trampling on German civil liberties, the Obama administration is besmirching America’s image and allowing Germans to feel morally superior to their former conqueror,” an editorial in the liberal LA Times stated after the NSA breach. It advised Obama to “rein in spying on Germany.”
Not likely. The German publication, Der Speigel, reported that “During Merkel’s last visit to Washington, US President Barack Obama wasn’t even willing to a no-spy agreement guaranteeing Germany a modicum of security.”
“The United States has f**ked the dog with one of our greatest and most valuable allies, Germany,” wrote James Wolcott in his blog piece, Malice in Blunderland. “F**ked the dog is the phrase commonly used in international relations to denote a major foul-up,” he added.
So, here we are, at odds with an important ally, while President Obama allows Iran more time to develop its nuclear capability and states that he wouldn’t rule out the reopening of our embassy in Tehran, Iran.
Again, our community organizer shows his foreign policy naiveté.
