Editorial: Diplomacy exposed

In any event international relations are not going to break down because of these leaks

THE initial response to the latest WikiLeaks disclosures is that they are a disaster for the US government because it has been shown to leak like a sieve; no one is going to trust it again after discovering what its officials have been saying about them.

The leaks are no such disaster. Although they provide a fascinating insight into way US officialdom works, they are of little material significance. Apart from some racy descriptions of international figures, there is almost nothing unexpected; nothing that was not already in the public domain. They contain almost nothing that a well-informed journalist could not have written. The impression given is of an army of highly-paid officials desperately seeking to justify their existence. And sometime failing. It is amazing how wrong some of the analysis is — such as that, two years after the AK party was elected in Turkey, confidently predicting it would soon fall apart.

This is hardly a case of whistle blowing. What the US thinks of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and so many others is salacious, even amusing. But it does no constitute wrongdoing. More to the point, the comments from US officials hardly begin to compare with what the international media have been saying about them.

If the aim of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assuage was to sow suspicion between the US and other nations, that is reprehensible. The world needs stability and security, not suspicion and enmity. Someone going round saying: “He said this about you...,” hoping to impress and win fame, does the opposite. In any event international relations are not going to break down because of what WikiLeaks has disclosed.

For a start, no international politician is going to be so foolish as to claim that Washington is dangerously and uniquely incapable of keeping secrets. The French, the British, the Russians and everyone else know that they could just as easily end up in the same boat. No information anywhere these days is watertight.

There is also fact that the British or the Italian or the Russian prime ministers almost certainly makes disparaging comments in private about Barrack Obama or Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy. They all do. It is in the nature of the job — and they all know it. But they are not so irresponsible as to let that get in the way of working with each other. They will dismiss these remarks as irrelevant — although no one has dismissed them so creatively as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who says that Washington organized the leaks to damage Arab-Iranian relations. So there you have it: WikiLeaks is a CIA operation. The seemingly (and perhaps understandably) paranoid Assuage can therefore sleep easy in his bed, knowing that he and Washington are in fact allies and that they are in it together. All he has to fear are the Swedish courts.

We can laugh at what the Americans think of Sarkozy or Medvedev and we would love to know what they think of Obama, although that for that we may have to wait for their memoirs to appear. Other than that, these leaks are a five-minute laugh — perhaps not even as long lasting as that.