WikiLeaks and the Damage to Global Security

The WikiLeaks revelations show how well the U.S. Foreign Service functions; yet, at the same time, they cause enormous damage because they destroy the confidentiality of diplomacy.

The United States has a well-organized diplomatic service. If there is anything at all to be learned from a quick and superficial reading of more than a quarter million State Department documents, it is this: Their ambassadors are doing their jobs well. The USA maintains about 250 consular offices throughout the world, where officials with political savvy and the ability to correctly analyze local conditions work. Sometimes they do so with patriotic exuberance, sometimes with enviable knowledge of their host nations and the local population, and sometimes they do so in a way that only strengthens the stereotype of the Ugly American.

After WikiLeaks released the stolen State Department dispatches, analyses, instructions and comments, the question now arises how much longer the United States will be able to enjoy the fruits of its diplomatic labors. The purloined information released by WikiLeaks destroys the connective tissue that makes normal communications possible — namely, confidentiality. Without confidentiality, there’s no information, no give-and-take, no access. Without information, there can be no knowledge, no judgment and no real basis for decision-making.

If the U.S. president is one day forced to make a decision to launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, one would hope he has reliable information on which to base his action. If the confrontation with China over its currency escalates, it will be imperative to have knowledgeable emissaries who enjoy the confidence of their Chinese counterparts. If the Opel automobile concern asks for a bailout using public funds, it will be necessary to have a secure line to the U.S. government, because it will be involved in any decision by General Motors as to what happens to the family silverware.

The damage to the United States since the document-leak is enormous. Nothing is immune from its effects. Diplomatic messages would just be snubbed. The diplomatic façade has crumbled, and we now see how coldly calculating the business of international politics really is. The American Foreign Service is no different from any other in the world. German diplomatic dispatches are probably only somewhat less humorous.

Outrage over the compromised data is great — that was to be expected. But the outrage should be primarily directed at all those who made the compromising possible, those who have degraded America’s data systems into a self-service shop used by low-ranking customers and hobby hackers. There is absolutely no reason why dispatches from the ambassador in Berlin should be accessible to a hesitant German chancellor or a disinterested foreign minister and a half million — some even say a million — uninvolved U.S. officials.

America’s information-gathering and evaluation systems are outmoded. Data security seems to be a foreign term to them. The volume of data collected by their intelligence services is so huge it can no longer be processed. In a vertical-mass bureaucracy where decisions are avoided and passed up the ladder to those few at the top, nothing is lost if the reports aren’t read by everyone.

Questionable Omniscient Omnipotence

Outrage is also directed at WikiLeaks, because this strange organization, with its even stranger founder at the helm, wallows in its omniscient omnipotence. A deity with terabytes of power! WikiLeaks’ motives are unfathomable. The world won’t be made safer because everyone knows everything about everyone else. Rather, the opposite is true.

Does that mean the media shouldn’t report anything about the leaks? Of course they should! Without the media, the data would have ended up on the Internet in its raw, unedited form, openly naming names of informants. That would have been even worse. The media also evaluate. Hillary Clinton’s instruction to diplomatic personnel to engage in spying operations on United Nations personnel is scandalous. Every newspaper in the world would have reported that story had they gotten it leaked to them directly.

Still, it would have been better had the flood of information never flowed out of the computers. The majority of the dispatches fall into the category of well-informed gossip. Everything the ambassador in Berlin wrote about the German government had already appeared in all the newspapers. And most people think they’ve already read more than enough about Silvio Berlusconi.

But enough sensitive stuff remains — Iran, Central Asia, the Arab world, China and North Korea. In these places, it’s a war-and-peace situation; it’s about life and death. Here, a diplomat’s judgment is important, and negotiations are undertaken with confidence and with confidentiality. America’s confidence account has been overdrawn by the leaks. In the future, a potentate in Central Asia will not confide anything to an American ambassador. That won’t help America’s ability to make judgments and decisions concerning that Central Asian nation. Taken together, that does nothing to make the world more secure.

The United States has been engaged in a decades-long battle for global credibility. WikiLeaks has now proven to be a weapon of mass destruction against the last shred of credibility it still had.