NSA spying row: Denmark helped US gather data on European officials, says report

And every US bombing campaign against the Syra regime de facto helped ISIL/ISIS.

Turkey, a NATO member, trained their own rebel groups and also made sure to have allow every jihadi to pass into Syria. Turkey is strongly anti-kurd. (Parts of this jihadi militia was this year sent to Azerbaijan by Turkey to fight against the Christian Armenians)

It is almost impossible for us outsiders to know what rebel group fought with what group and what objectives CIA actually had, however just the fact that US helped create a terrorist hotbed in Syria, together with a NATO ally, which in turn lead to terrorist attacks in Europe. Or the terrorist hotbed that was sprung up in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi.

Depending on the level of trust you have for American intelligence services you could either say that because of unintended consequences it resulted in terrorist attacks due to incompetent management or that working with the enemy of my enemy is part of their tactics and collateral damage is part of the game.

On the surface it looks like a failure for CIA because Bashar al-Assad is still in power, however it was not a failure for the coalition behind US/CIA, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, e.g. Israel has now permanently annexed the Golan Heights from Syria. Syria war was proxy war against Iran, which is an ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, see the Yemen war.

> ...the problem here is that no one really wants to reign it in...

Why shouldn't it spy on people? If the state is fundamentally on our side, that is a win (fuzzy abstract principles like privacy vs. concrete benefits like stopping specific illegal activity). Ditto if the state is neutral. We have no need to keep secrets from a neutral but fundamentally principled entity. Privacy isn't really important enough to worry about if there are just a few bad actors working individually. It'd be a battle of a luxury (privacy) vs a need (security)

It is only because the state is fundamentally not on our side that people should be trying to reign it in and use concepts like privacy to do so. At some point any information the state has will be used by your political adversaries to attack.

Privacy (from the state) isn't worth anything if the starting point is that the administrative state will be a reliable, proper and responsible bearer of power.

Only if we abandon the oxford dictionary and head over to DoD where defence means "defend ourselves, our allies, or our interests, or the interests of our allies" which is basically power projection.

You don't need 11 carriers to defend yourself, you need them to play world police, support Japan in conflict with China, etc. You could argue it's necessary, but that's a different argument.

EU taken together has a larger airforce and navy than Russia does, army has better training and equipment. China is too far away to be a credible threat. France has it's own nukes and missiles. All of Europe, whereever one might draw those borders, is larger still.

The only credible counter argument is that EU military is not united and doesn't act as one, but whether Latvia will spend 2% or 200% GDP they can't beat Russia.

Recently the UK has gotten 2 carriers, with a lot of lobbying from US, while at the same time cutting ground troops and army equipment, so we are sacrificing European defence for power projection.