The Sunnylands summit was billed by the White House as an opportunity for Barack Obama to his confront his new Chinese counterpart with a litany of American complaints about hacking and cyber theft.
The revelations of the past few days about the Obama administration's own electronic surveillance and cyber operations have done a lot to blur the sharp, bright edges of this gameplan. It was not Xi Jinping at the podium today on the defensive against allegations of an overweening state infringing the civil liberties of its citizens – it was Obama.
There is no question here of an equivalence between the United States and China when it comes to basic freedoms. The access of the Chinese people to information and open discussion is severely constricted by the constraints imposed by the party leadership. Americans, by contrast, can use of the internet virtually without impediment; it is just they can no longer be sure of doing so in private.
President Xi does not need to prove equivalence, however. He just has to point to the contradictions between America's stated ideals and the way those ideals have been compromised in the pursuit of security. Obama has helped muddy the water for him.
Addressing the surveillance disclosures on Friday, Obama pointed out: "You can't have 100% security and also 100% privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society."
The question posed by this week's revelations is whether his administration has made the right choices on behalf of American society or whether the dream of near-perfect security has taken undue precedence over the way of life the state is supposed to be securing. Translated on the world stage – on which Obama must stand today – the question is whether the pursuit of overwhelming hard power has come too much at the expense of the softer variety.
One of the most relevant examples has been the cyber-attacks mounted on Iran, in which the US is widely and convincingly reported to have taken part, along with Israel. The Stuxnet worm slipped into Iranian uranium enrichment systems may have crashed hundreds of centrifuges, but three years later it is clear it did nothing to halt the steady progress of the Iranian nuclear programme. But it did generate a storm of controversy over the legality of the attack. That controversy is a burden on Obama today as he tries to convince Xi to accept strict new rules-of-the-road for cyber behaviour.
Similarly, the row over the US National Security Agency's collection of telephone data and the tapping into the computer systems of US internet providers under the Prism program hamstrings Washington when it tries to set global norms for internet freedom and privacy, just as the continued existence of the Guantánamo prison camp hampers the US government's efforts to set standards for basic human rights.
On the face of it, it has been the Guardian and the Washington Post that have brought embarrassment to Obama on the eve of a critical summit between the world's most powerful nation and its biggest. But more fundamentally, it is the choices and compromises that the Obama administration has sought to make in secret have been showed to be incompatible with the position it seeks to hold in the global arena.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
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