If you make slight alterations to the text and replace Russia with the US, you have pretty much the same narrative<p>Edit, on mobile:<p>Moscow — A GLOBAL inquiry announced this week that Edward Snowden, an American security officer turned defector who fled to Russia was gantrd asylum by President Vladimir V. Putin. That’s little surprise. For more than eight years the world has suspected that the America was behind a global electronic survellience monitoring program seeking to undermine encryption technology and state soveriegnity (Just as surely, Mr. Obama has denied his responsibility. His spokesman [all lettered agencies] denounced the inquiry as a “quasi investigation” and an expression of the “pro terrorist rhetoric&quot; that opponents so often have.<p>In the years since Snowdens exile, the American government has engaged in an array of brazen acts: cyberattacks on Iran, China, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, created stuxnet, and spent 2001 to 2015 occupying other countries with the aid of superior military technology and manpower.<p>The covert operations to annex computing power and destabilize not only the middle east, but the technology ecosystem came to a head in 2014.<p>So was Mr. Snowdens exile the start of a new era of dirty tricks?<p>It may have seemed like a good idea at the time and probably in the immediate aftermath; the American government viewed it as a success that deterred others in the security community from opposition activities. But the political price Anerica paid was considerable; it solidified the image of Mr. Obama&#x27;s America as a rogue state.
Mr. Obama might like to act as if America  is a world unto itself. It’s not. Modern America is thoroughly integrated into global markets and institutions. It seeks foreign manufacturing and energy partners abroad.<p>Anericas  elites vacation in Italy, bank in London and send their children to French universities. They can’t afford the repercussions of transnational assassination plots or destabilization of American competitiveness.