Nobody Wants to Play With U.S.

Over the last week more documents and details have been fed to the populous from the Snowden collection of NSA secrets. The latest revelation is that the US of A has not only been spying on terrorist groups, China, and Russia, but also the leadership of the EU and other countries for the past 6 years.

This latest bit of embarrassing news has, understandably, outraged several ally nations which prompted a slew of questions and outright demands for explanations from around the EU directed at Washington.

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have tried to play these new leaks down. Secretary Kerry stated, "Every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs of national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contributes to that," But these dismissive remarks appear to have only provoked further anger among some European leaders, who seem genuinely shocked and aghast at the scope of the NSA’s blatent disregard for the 1961 Vienna accord. Elsewhere, government officials in Luxemburg, Austria, Turkey, and Japan have demanded answers from the Obama administration about the NSA’s spying efforts. And U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon raising serious questions about the faithfulness of the United States diplomatic core.

There are two possible lines of logic that I can follow that could lead the government to take these extreme measures. The first being that we are truly scared of countries like France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. We fear that they may be helping terrorists enter this country under the guise of a diplomatic convoy and using these connections to get so close to our upper echelons of government that these terrorists would complain about the President's bad breath before exploding their suicide vests. Leaving us with little recourse but to pull a Jack Bauer try and get a step ahead of these groups to protect ourselves.

The other scenario that I see is that the United State's negotiating position has gotten as weak as a starving mans farts over the years, and we are so incapable in regaining a more persuasive position when going into something as mundane as trade talks, that we feel obligated to obtain an upper hand through these amoral methods.

Seeing the almost daily revelations that this administration (with an acknowledgement that a lot of this began prior to Obama's election) of diplomatic failures, be it the Ecuador trade agreement, the North Korean saber rattling, Iran still thumbing their nose at us, or dozens of failures in the middle east, a different explanation seems somewhat more likely;

This administration sucks at negotiating...

Sucks the big one, sucks like a leech on a blood bag, like a plunger on my toilet after mexican night, like a movie starring Nicholas Cage, well you get the idea. Be it a sanction against a country doing something wrong or trying to enforce a treaty for extraditing. This administration appears to have such a poor track record of using it's leverage, winning friends in the diplomatic arena, and rallying countries to the American view to the point that it has cheat and lie it's way into getting an upper hand at the negotiating table. The truly sad part is that this method still appears to leave the U.S. wondering what just happened on many occasions.

This administration, especially, has built it's reputation on it's ability to talk. Though it looks like every time someone talks back, it suffers from a lack of ability to justify itself, and lacks any true conviction or guiding principals in it's navigation and foreign policy.

America is now standing on an island. We have disenfranchised our friends, and forsaken our own populace. Either that or the new practice of diplomats just mumbling their demands in their embassies late at night and waiting for the US to respond on a card that is delivered via a secret code embedded in the monthly unemployment numbers. Ironically all this takes place while also we discuss building up a massive wall on our borders, because not having any country willingly talk to us is not sufficient, we don't want to look at them or smell them either. A very rude gesture since we come visit almost every country in the world in the form of setting up military bases all over the globe. We can't return the favor of being a good host?