The Spying Scandal and Transatlantic Ties

On May 30, a consortium of major European media outlets brought to light yet another spying scandal involving the United States’ systematic and long-term espionage campaign against its closest European allies. According to a report following an internal investigation of the Danish Defense Intelligence Services (FE) completed in 2015, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), notorious for its mass global signals intelligence collection, had eavesdropped on the top leaders and high-ranking officials of Germany, Sweden, Norway and France through cooperation with the FE.

Role of Denmark

Faced with fierce criticism from these countries, the Danish Government claimed that the U.S. already ceased carrying out wiretapping activities against European leaders in 2014. However, only the most naive would believe that the United States would cancel its spying network in Europe. Startlingly, according to the Danish media, the FE did not consider that the details contained in the 2015 report gave enough reason to halt the cooperation with the NSA.

Denmark is one of the crown jewels in the U.S.-led transatlantic intelligence community. Located at the landing points of many submarine cables connecting the U.S., the UK and the European continent, Denmark geographically constitutes one of the most important hubs for the communication and data stream from European countries and Russia. By exploiting the FE’s espionage system and capabilities, the NSA managed to intercept and collect every telephone conversation, online chat messages and texts from the targeted politicians and officials’ telephones on a hitherto unseen magnitude. The NSA and the FE were also able to collect and analyze the metadata passed through the Internet cables.

Divisive alliance

The U.S. wiretapping of its European allies has exposed the divisions that exist within the Atlantic Alliance. No matter under the rule of the elephant or the donkey, the U.S. has always been suspicious about the efforts of major countries such as Germany and France to strengthen European strategic autonomy and expand EU defense cooperation through programs like PESCO, a strategic platform enabling the swift and seamless movement of military personnel and assets throughout the EU.

These U.S. surveillance operations not only threatened the security of the allies upon which they spied, but also fundamentally threatened the sovereignty of Denmark. When a country’s intelligence services are constantly serving foreign goals and engage in actions that are contrary to its own national interests, it is safe to say that the country’s sovereignty has been compromised and eroded. What’s worse is that this compromised sovereignty raises the question of whether or not a liberal democracy where elected officials cannot fully control the intelligence services is a real liberal democracy. As Pernille Boye Koch from the Danish Institute for Human Rights has pointed out, the conspiracy of the FE and the NSA, and the lack of supervision and civilian control on intelligence services undermines Danish democracy. The U.S. alliance system serves not so much liberal democratic values as it serves the hegemonic interests of the U.S.

A bargaining chip

The new spying scandal, like previous ones, also reveals the absurdity of various groundless “China threat theories.” The United States has blocked Chinese companies from participating in trans-Pacific submarine cable projects in the name of security concerns and excluded Chinese companies from participating in 5G construction by launching a so-called “Clean Network” initiative in the name of protecting citizens’ privacy and companies’ sensitive information.

Ironically, it is the United States that poses the most serious threat to the global cyber order and information security. It is also the United States that operates the most notorious spy network tracking its closest allies.

It’s no secret that the European intelligence services usually cooperate with the United States to spy on political figures in their own and other countries. So, why did the European media choose to throw an “old bomb” just weeks before Joe Biden’s first European trip as president?

The main reason is that the European elites are trying to use this scandal as a bargaining chip to increase their negotiating leverage against the United States, especially in the context of Biden’s proposal to redefine transatlantic relations. The European elites clearly know that the main

purpose of Biden’s trip is to mobilize Europe to join the U.S. in an all-dimensional strategic competition with China and Russia. Those exposing the scandal hope to use this leverage to increase Europe’s strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty, and to enhance Europe’s position in the Atlantic Alliance.

One of the direct driving factors for the EU’s efforts to build its own digital infrastructure such as GAIA-X, which aims to create a unified cloud infrastructure shared across the continent, is to gain autonomy from their Big Brother’s ubiquitous surveillance system, as exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In the long run, if major European powers do not take decisive measures to rebuild the supervision of their own intelligence agencies and cut off external interference, the U.S. intelligence espionage network against European leaders and civilians will continue to operate. The sovereignty, security and the coherence of the democratic systems of European countries will be seriously threatened. In the future, the U.S. might be able to shift the focus of European intelligence services to China, which is undoubtedly contrary to the long-term interests of European countries.

Kang Jie is assistant research fellow with the China Institute of International Studies.