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Comment by dendory | Hacker News Reader

When you're a global power and have no scruple, like the US, then there's nothing any country can do. Either they do exactly what the US agencies tell them, or they risk getting thrown out of trade agreements, financial treaties, diplomatic consequences, and in the end, the US will just do whatever it wants anyways, since they have military bases all around the world and enough power to monitor and spy as much as they want, international laws be damned.

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Even more than that, the US has most of the best military hardware on sale. If you want to be able to buy the weaponry to compete in todays world, you pretty much have to buy it from the US (or it's closest allies).

That's a very big stick right there.

The more I hear about this, the more glad I am about ESA/EADS/Airbus et al. I know that the large european countries aren't much better, but it's still comforting to know that we work on Galileo, use Leopards and Eurofighters, etc.

>If you want to be able to buy the weaponry to compete in todays world,

If you'd said this twenty five years ago, it would make sense. But today? Who is the great menacing villain (other than the US)? What weapons do they have? There is no enemy other than our own warmongers.

Of course there is something a country can do. They can object loudly and obnoxiously. It would require the other countries to have more scruples than the US.

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