Trade is important. Some level of cooperation is good. But these are independent, powerful countries (especially Germany), and they ought to act like it.
Friendship from the the US is like that friend who comes by, puts his muddy boots on your desk, tells you to fix his computer, stubs a cigarette out on the carpet, and on his way out punches a neighbour for looking at him funny. Once in a while he'll turn up with some guy he beat up, and tell you that this is evidence of his benevolent protection... and you'd better keep on my good side, bro. You wouldn't like me when I'm mad.
This act alone, if done publicly and loudly, would quite likely decrease any variety of terroristic threat to cooperating nations, merely through the act of disassociation with the USA, thus making their threats utterly toothless.
As it is, however, through TTIP and TPP the world is further embroiling themselves in the affairs of this embattled state, and matters can only worsen.
Democracy is a very, very low resolution way of making decisions. Politicians virtually never run on a platform of foreign policy. It's always domestic issues. Once they get elected on domestic issues they then implement whatever foreign policy they personally feel like.
There are three countries in Europe that, by themselves, have a larger GDP than Russia. The Soviet Union and Red Army are gone. As bellicose as Putin is, he is militarily bogged down in Ukraine. Europe has no need of a US "security blanket."
This is the same BS cold-war narratives in order to justify pressure on Russia, as if Russia will attempt to take over Europe or something, which is laughable. At least in the cold war era USSR was indeed more powerful, and had control over Eastern Europe.
The whole game is about replacing Russian leadership with some friendly Yeltsin like lackey figure, so foreign powers can pillage on Russian natural resources, contracts etc. They could not give a rats arse about "human rights" and the like, they just want to create the same devastation they created elsewhere already.
As if this were anything other than straw man argument:
LOL. There's no "security blanket" and no real security threats. The US and Europe are bigger security threats to the rest of the world than the inverse. You have to believe tons of propaganda to believe there's actually a danger to Western Europe or the US from outside. That's basically BS to justify control of key natural resources, trade routes, etc regions, like Iraq and the like.
The basic reason Europe doesn't say "fuck you" to the US is that for one, European and US elites are mostly working together, and second the US is a 100.000 pound gorilla, where Western European countries, post 1940 are not what they used to be. If France or the UK were the empires they were in the colonial times you'd see much more tension with the US to pursue their particular interests. But as it is, they are toothless, and it's an US world they have to live in.
I'm pretty sure the EU intelligence community is crapping themselves at the thought of a huge leak happening to them.
It's always struck me as bizarre that, at least in discussion forums like HN, the US is regarded as an unusually bad actor when it's simply the leader of the gang.
^The Eu itself doesn't have a spy organisation, but plenty of EU countries do.
Compared to the US, the scale might be rather tame, but that has more to do with the bloated US intelligence budget than with any "respect" for privacy on the part of the european intelligence services.
Meanwhile, in France there would be riots in the streets, ports would be blocked by truckers and the wheels would fall off everything - which is par for the course when anyone upsets the French :P
The odd part is that the media seems to think it's all Putin, but the US is almost always referred to as the entity (as opposed to simply Obama).
Everyone seems to keep expecting the world to react, specifically the EU, but nothing seems to ever happen.
One the one hand, I am quite disappointed at the German government's lack of courage to stand up to the US.
On the other hand, if I was Snowden, I would not go to Germany even if the government was on their knees begging me to come here, given the number of US soldiers and intelligence operatives stationed in Germany. So the whole question if Germany should offer asylum to Snowden seems kind of hypothetical to me.