| May be related to Australia being a part of the Five Eyes. Keep in mind though that the UK is a special case in the EU in many many ways. However there are many organizations, countries and interests involved here. There are the US, the rest of the world, the EU, the NATO, the Five Eyes, other trade agreements and even lots of special agreements (partly known for a long time, partly due to the Snowden revelations) with countries such as France, Germany and others, like Austria (there is a UN HQ, next to a espionage outpost by the NSA). We now know that pretty much every US embassy also has a lot of SIGINT going on, same for US military bases (they still exist!) in Germany. There are "privately" owned places by the NSA, secret agreements with governments, companies, institutions, etc. When a country secret laws (or interpretations of such), operates secret prisons, outposts, spies on embassies and international institutions, operates spy satellites that happen to be next to telecommunication satellites, etc. then it's really naive to think they you change some laws and things won't be happen anymore. Do you really think in a country where agencies spy on the senate, where there are secret interpretations of laws by secret courts that democratic means have any chance of working? Also given economical and military power how do you want to put pressure on the US? Even with some economic power the US military is still the biggest and best funded and as history has shown it's not only there for defense. I don't think this can be changed easily, not because of thinking bad of the US (government), but because the system is big and strongly relies on these things. Big, complex systems are incredibly hard to change. The technicians here probably understand that. Don't get me wrong. It may be possible, but the chance is low and fundamental changes might even lead to unrest. That's sad, but changing the system has been tried in many ways, even in the US, but the way the economic and military system works right now usually got strengthened or made more static. It's maybe what you'd call a technical debt in the sense that you build up on something that's not right. You might wanna try a rewrite, but think about "rewrites" are in the context of a country. I am thinking about the French Revolution or "tearing down" of Germany after World War 2 here. The US also has no history of that really being possible, because they never lost in the sense of needing to rebuild, while in Europe alone in the past 100 years everything changed completely in the couple of 100 years. You can't blame the US for not doing that. It's not nice. Maybe a better way is possible, but so far history has no real examples of it, especially not for countries (or realms) that were so big and complex. Maybe it would even be better to do it small scale, maybe even by the states in the US declaring independence, because big realms tend to end up with one or two totalitarian systems in between and millions of death. Smaller countries or simply groups of fewer people tend to be more flexible (see startups). Maybe there is another way. It would be really great if a lot of things would change, because currently civil rights that were made in order to prevent a lot of bad things from ever happening again are by many not considered something of value anymore (even though people like to pretend otherwise, but civil rights, human rights are by definition and intention nothing that you only care for when things are good). |
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who advised many US presidents in the last couple of decades wrote many books. Among those books there is The Grand Chessboard. It explains a really large part of the US politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard