'It is hard not to write satire," the Roman poet Juvenal famously quipped, adding: "I get an itch to run off beyond the Sarmatians and the frozen sea every time those men, who pretend to be paragons of virtue and live an orgy, dare to spout about morals."
Fast forward to the land the Romans called Germania. Recall the furor unleashed by National Security Agency tattletale Edward Snowden. U.S. intelligence, he let it be known, had burrowed into Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone. Dubbed "Handygate" (Germans call mobile phones "handys"), the affair united the country in an uproar over American arrogance.
How can you spy on friends? bellowed the chorus of indignation. We don't do it to you, how dare you do it to us? Parliament formed an NSA committee. The CIA station chief in Berlin was sent packing.
Now, however, the chorus has fallen silent. It turns out that German intelligence services eavesdropped on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, and thereafter at least once on John Kerry. As they say, pride goeth before the fall. Meanwhile, the Turks have declared diplomatic war on Berlin after learning that they have been, and surely will continue to be, the target of Germany's systematic, NSA-style digital snooping.
The startling twist: Contrary to what they had to say about Handygate, German politicos and commentators are reacting like . . . a great power. German spying on NATO ally Turkey wasn't verboten, the argument goes, but rather legitimate and salutary. Turkey is at war with the terror brigades of the Kurdish PKK inside that country, and it abuts Syria and Iraq. The country provides a land bridge for jihadists to join Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria—and for those coming in to plot attacks on European targets.
Besides, nobody knows where Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stands. Is he playing with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are financing Sunni fighters in Syria and Iraq? Or with Moscow and Tehran, which are backing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad against the Sunni jihadists? Therefore, Berlin should know what Ankara is thinking.
So Berlin has come up with a Talmudic distinction between "friends" and mere "partners." The U.S. or Britain are friends, hence off-limits to German spying and not entitled to snoop on the Germans. Partners such as Turkey are fair game.
At least Germany's leaders haven't taken seriously Rolf Mützenich, the foreign-policy expert of the Social Democrats who share power in Ms. Merkel's coalition. Why spy, Mr. Mützenich demands to know, if Germany "can talk to Turkish officials to find out what we need to know about the PKK?" Why spend billions for intelligence if you can consult your trusty neighborhood strongman? Why not ask Mr. Putin what those "Little Green Men" are doing in eastern Ukraine?
The Germans are waking up to the nasty ways of modern power-politics. Force, both underhanded and direct, is back in that vast arc spanning Ukraine via the Levant to Afghanistan. It was easy to "spout about morals," to re-quote Juvenal, in the good old days when Western Europe was sheltered by America's strategic might. But under Mr. Obama, the world's policeman has been trying to shed his burden. As nature abhors a vacuum, so does the international system. And the bad guys are coming closer.
Others are waking up as well. Britain is toying with a new aircraft carrier. The French are dispatching arms to the Iraqi Kurds. While delivering nonlethal aid such as body armor to Kurds battling the Islamic State, the Germans are now earnestly debating whether to double down with war materiel. Such a move has been an almost religious no-no for decades.
Berlin will certainly beef up its intelligence and counterintelligence assets. Stung by Handygate, Germans will want to make life harder for the CIA and NSA on their soil. They also will have tradable goodies in dealing with their comrades-in-snooping in the U.S., France and Britain. These are the eternal ways of spycraft. You have to be able to give in order to get—both in respect and rewards.
But having been caught doing to the U.S. what the U.S. has been doing to them, the Germans may also lower their Self-Righteousness Quotient. And they might take a cue from Hillary Clinton, who was recently asked by Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung whether friends may spy on each other. The former secretary of state shot back: "Always. Forever. All over the world."
That is no satire. It's reality.
Mr. Joffe is editor of Die Zeit in Hamburg, and a fellow at the Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford. His latest book is "The Myth of America's Decline" (Norton, 2013).
