US Spy Scandals Show Western Allies Not As Allied As Portrayed

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Hungary is, in theory, aligned with Ukraine as a member of the EU and NATO. However, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has expressed sympathy for Russian agendas and has the closest relationship with Moscow of any current EU leader. Orban has even repeatedly attempted to block EU aid to Ukraine.

The alleged discovery of a Hungarian spy network may ramp up the creeping distrust of Hungary by other EU members and the sense of it becoming even more closely aligned with Russia.

There has even been a recently reported example of spying going on among countries that are loosely considered allies. North Korean spies were recently caught spying on China , for example.

The Greenland and Hungary episodes, particularly, shed light on how the world order is being remade. We are in the middle of this shift, with technology-enabled intelligence playing a significant part. These episodes demonstrate that governments that thought they were allies are quickly discovering they could be adversaries.

Regulation by revelation

The US's reported efforts at spying on Greenland and Denmark are a window into the intelligence business.

Intelligence efforts against allies are generally only curtailed when they become subject to a public scandal. Intelligence historian Richard Aldrich described this as “regulation by revelation” . The inquiries into these operations normally result in a light censure from politicians or judges, pledges not to repeat the offences and subsequent changes to processes .

Denmark claims the US has been spying on Greenland.

What will happen in the Greenland case is as yet unclear, particularly when the Trump administration has shown itself to be particularly immune from public, media and political challenge. The most effective challenge to hostile activity against Greenland could be any ramifications for international stock market sentiment, but even that is not guaranteed.

The reliance of the US Constitution and international law on participants behaving appropriately now looks strained under the Trump administration. The lack of restraint on US power may cause nations to rely more heavily on their own intelligence capabilities.

Intelligence could, as a policy area, begin to mirror that of tariffs and trade as a way that the US can create further uncertainty among other nations about its foreign policy objectives.

Technology makes it easy

But another factor in contemporary intelligence is that nations can now spy on each other much more easily. Technical capabilities are getting cheaper and easier to use .

For instance, communications intercepts, satellite imagery and open source data analysis spying methods are cheaper than ever before. These approaches offer more insight because of the development of machine analytics and the ready availability of computing power and data storage .

So, allies will continue to spy on allies because they are able to. That ability drives a demand, even in peacetime, to know what other national leaders, and their public, are thinking and doing.

Nations will also aggressively spy at the moment because the world is particularly unstable, and on the edge of conflict in many regions. Understanding where conflicts might erupt, why and with what force and consequence is essential to any nation's defence posture.