Wikileaks’ latest disclosures of roughly a quarter of a million confidential or secret American foreign policy cables understandably has Washington in a fit. Washington’s inability to protect secret assessments, understandings and conversations with foreign governments and their leaders may again be damaged by some of the disclosures.
Yet it’s hard to imagine that the nation’s core goals and foreign-policy initiatives will be permanently compromised or sabotaged simply because a curtain has been lifted on the back stories of issues and leaders that are usually dressed up in diplomatic pretense for the public stage. In most cases, the leap from political artifice to confidential candor is instead more likely to explain the often perceived gap between those two poles.
A sampling of the dispatches, released on condition of anonymity to The New York Times and various news media in Europe, will be the subject of reports in the United States and abroad over the coming days. The Times has promised to carefully edit, exclude or redact the material it publishes to protect sensitive sources and important secret material. The Guardian newspaper in England and Der Spiegel new magazine in Germany are likely to do the same.
That will not relieve the continuing headache and source of embarrassment and broken trust for the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, the State Department and other agencies. But general public interest may be short-lived. Americans and Europeans became quickly inured to the dribble of detail from Wikileaks’ earlier disclosures of secret cables, activities and assessments concerning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That is likely to be the same reaction to the latest round of candid cables allegedly leaked by an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been under arrest since early summer.
The substance of the cables will mainly pique the interests of political and foreign policy figures, journalists and people interested generally in the back-room insights into how U.S. foreign policy is conducted and measured.
A New York Times review Monday of foreign policy cables regarding several topics is illustrative. One cable discussed how Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah had repeatedly warned Washington, in a reference to Iran’s nuclear weapons work, to “cut off the head of the snake” before it was too late. Other Sunni Arab nations reportedly had similar feeling about the danger poised by Iran.
Other cables claimed that Saudi donors continued to be the chief source of funds for al-Qaida; that Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s brother-in-law was involved in drug dealing and that the president was not trustworthy; that Syria blatantly lies about its efforts to stem the flow of increasingly advanced arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon; that Russia is distancing itself from democracy; that document China’s rise and power, and Pakistan’s refusal to cooperate with U.S. efforts to gain control of Pakistan’s enriched uranium fuels.
The fly-on-the-wall picture of foreign policy concerns, of the United States and a raft of other nations, fleshes out perceptions that generally go unspoken. It’s obvious to any interested observer that Vladimir Putin is more interested in Russia’s security and future power than a functional democracy; that Sunni Arabs around the Persian Gulf fear a nuclear Shiite Iran; that Yemen has to hide its cooperation with U.S. anti-terrorism actions. What is interesting are the personal, candid insights that explain and give substance to the policies and dilemmas by which diplomatic pursuits are measured.
The candor revealed by the Wikileaks trove may well threaten some sources and hinder some goals. But the latter is likely to pass. It is the press of trends, power dynamics and economic and physical survival that propel diplomatic ties. For better or worse, those will continue to outweigh outrage over leaks.