Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore assert that “the deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on US national security: They undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it”:
Of course, the United States is far from the only hypocrite in international politics. But the United States’ hypocrisy matters more than that of other countries. That’s because most of the world today lives within an order that the United States built, one that is both underwritten by US power and legitimated by liberal ideas. … This system needs the lubricating oil of hypocrisy to keep its gears turning. To ensure that the world order continues to be seen as legitimate, US officials must regularly promote and claim fealty to its core liberal principles; the United States cannot impose its hegemony through force alone. But as the recent leaks have shown, Washington is also unable to consistently abide by the values that it trumpets. This disconnect creates the risk that other states might decide that the US-led order is fundamentally illegitimate.
Agreed. And this is one of liberalism’s great weak spots. It cannot abide hypocrisy while never fully understanding how, in a fallen world, it is a key lubricant for almost all human society. As someone once wrote, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. It reflects the simple fact that we cannot live up to the ideals we often have. So they keep some things on the down-low. This is true of all of us, including governments. Most marriages, for example, could not survive total transparency. The manifold husbands staying up late to jack off on the computer downstairs do not want to tell their wives, because it would hurt the marriage they actually want to keep. But they cannot help their sex drive, the power of novelty in sexual attraction, or the astonishingly easy access to porn morning, noon and night. So discretion in these cases – which can be a form of hypocrisy – is the norm.
In other words, hypocrisy – of the mildest kind – makes marriage possible. It makes any relationship – business or otherwise – possible. It makes statecraft particularly possible in ways Glenn Greenwald, I’m afraid, has not fully accepted. I’m not defending unnecessary secrecy or lack of democratic accountability and a certain degree of transparency. I’m defending a more pragmatic approach to how we actually live our lives in society and how some level of hypocrisy makes that possible. Hypocrisy is also a two-way street. Are we supposed to believe that the aggrieved Angela Merkel does not have her own espionage capacities, does not spy on other countries, does not scoop up intelligence? Of course not. Yet we respect her complaints as a necessary form of hypocrisy.
Because fully exposing that hypocrisy, however noble and exhilarating, takes a toll on how the world is governed, and how countries are defended. Writing elsewhere, Farrell notes that American leaks are also putting foreign governments, such as Brazil’s, in a tight spot:
Leaked documents from Manning, Snowden and others are making it much harder for other states to pretend that they don’t know what the US is doing. The US is less able to hypocritically pretend that it’s not doing stuff that it is doing, while other states are less able to hypocritically ignore what the US is doing. The result is that systematized hypocrisy is becoming a lot more costly for the US than it used to be.
Joshua Foust is troubled:
Seen this way, you could envision all of these disclosures from Snowden not to be a defense of civil liberties – the documents moved past that a while ago. And it is important to remember: the NSA is legally obligated to surveil foreign communications — that is its explicit purpose as constructed by US law. Rather, they are an attack on the very existence and behavior of the US intelligence community. That may be something some of the most ardent anti-NSA activists, such as Glenn Greenwald, are comfortable doing. But it should raise all sorts of uncomfortable questions among those who merely want reform. Putting the US at a stark disadvantage compared to its most active rivals and competitors – neither Russia nor China face nearly as much scrutiny in their intelligence activities, for example – is difficult to see as anything other than an attack on the US, not a defense of anyone’s rights.
Farrell disagrees:
This seems to me to be basically mistaken. If Snowden, or Greenwald, were looking simply to ‘attack’ the US, they would be behaving in very different ways. It is pretty clear that they are (or, in Snowden’s case, were) sitting on a hoard of material, some of which is potentially far more damaging to US intelligence (by revealing methodologies, etc.) than anything they have revealed. What they have chosen to reveal is embarrassing, and revelatory of US hypocrisy, rather than striking at the heart of NSA methodologies. You may like this, or dislike this, depending on your political druthers. But it is far closer to the kinds of actions that human rights NGOs engage in than the kinds of action that spies do.
NGOs are under few illusions about governments’ profound commitment to human rights, civil liberties and so on – most governments, much of the time, are prepared to water these commitments down where it is expedient, when they do not abandon them altogether. So what NGOs do is to play the politics of hypocrisy against states, strategically revealing hypocritical behavior so as to embarrass governments into behaving better. Snowden’s and Greenwald’s actions seem to fit very well into this framework.
Drezner adds:
Going forward, it will be interesting to see whether the Obama administration adopts new policies and rhetoric designed to reduce the exposed levels of hypocrisy. So far, administration officials have veered in the opposite direction – the mantra of “we’re only using this super-high-powered surveillance stuff on foreigners, not Americans” has tarnished America’s image abroad even more. Unless the US government changes its tune, then we’re about to get a good empirical test of what happens when the hegemon’s “lubricating oil of hypocrisy” evaporates.
That would not be pretty.
The Dish 