United States

The government’s accessing of phone records was again the issue when in June 2013 Edward Snowden, an American intelligence contractor, revealed through The Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency had compelled telecommunications company Verizon to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialed and duration of calls) for millions of its subscribers. He also disclosed the existence of a broader data-mining program that gave the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Government Communications Headquarters—Britain’s NSA equivalent—“direct access” to the servers of such Internet giants as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. Snowden was charged with espionage by the U.S. and ultimately ended up in Russia, where he received temporary refugee status. In August, Bradley Manning, who had provided the Web site WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010, was convicted of espionage and theft, among other charges, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Removal of Mohammed Morsi, Obama’s “red line” in Syria, and chemical weapons

Developments in Egypt and Syria in 2013 continued to provide major challenges for U.S. foreign policy. When protests against the Egyptian military’s removal of Mohammed Morsi from the presidency in July led to the killing of hundreds of his supporters in July and August, some American politicians called for the suspension of U.S. financial aid to Egypt (more than $1 billion per year), citing U.S. law that required the federal government to terminate aid if power in the recipient country changed as a result of a coup. Attempting to maintain a neutral stance, the Obama administration hesitated to label Morsi’s removal a coup but called for a quick return to civilian leadership.

Seemingly reluctant to be drawn into military involvement in another conflict in the Middle East, the administration had also been cautious in its response to the Syrian Civil War. While it had begun providing food and financial aid to those who were opposing the regime of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad in February 2013, the U.S. government did not provide military support to the opposition until June, largely in response to reports of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces. Commenting on a possible U.S. response to events in Syria, Obama had said in May 2012, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” In late August 2013, in response to reports that an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian government had killed hundreds of people in suburban Damascus on August 21, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, in a statement released by Cameron’s office, “reiterated that significant use of chemical weapons would merit a serious response from the international community”; both men tasked officials of their governments and military “to examine all the options.”

The decision not to respond militarily in Syria

However, despite British intelligence assessments that chemical weapons had been used in the incident on August 21 and that it was “highly likely” that the Assad regime had been responsible, on August 29 Parliament voted against endorsing Cameron’s call for military intervention in principle. The next day, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States had “high certainty” that chemical weapons had been used and that government forces had carried out the attack. After indicating that U.S. military response would be forthcoming, even without British involvement, Obama shifted gears on August 31 and asked for congressional authorization for military action while awaiting the findings of UN weapons inspectors who had returned from Damascus after examining the site of the attack. Released on September 16, their report indicated that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that the nerve agent sarin had been delivered by surface-to-surface rockets; however, it did not attempt to assess responsibility for the attack. Two days earlier the United States and Russia, a key supporter of the Assad regime, had brokered an agreement on a framework under which Syria would accede to the international Chemical Weapons Convention and submit to the controls of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, provide a comprehensive listing of its chemical weapons arsenal within a week, destroy all of its chemical mixing and filling equipment by November, and eliminate all of its chemical weapons by mid-2014.

The 2013 government shutdown