Not-So-Diplomatic Secrets

The U.S. government has found itself in an embarrassing situation since Sunday, with the unveiling of thousands of government documents via the website WikiLeaks. There will be many more in the next few weeks when the entirety of the 251,287 documents are made public; in Canada, the matter will generate some talk since some 2,600 of them might be about us. There will probably be internal notes on the opinions the U.S. government has on our prime minister and others on the Quebec party and sovereignty movement, which risked disturbing Canadian-American relations.

A few “state secrets” have been revealed so far, and they reveal some information of interest to international affairs. For example, the repeated pressure of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia encouraging the U.S. to bomb Iran’s nuclear power plants and the fact that North Korea was the supplier of missiles to Iran. Internally these elements were certainly widely known and probably also widely known within the vast diplomatic community of almost all states. The difference is that all of this is now revealed to all, and the people of countries where freedom of speech exists are now informed. For all other countries all this remains a big secret.

This information was found in diplomatic notes that ambassadors and personnel of ministries of foreign affairs exchange with their governments. They are internal documents and are sometimes classified. A lot of the information that has come to light relates more to the personal domain, such as the habits of one or another head of state. Particularly, we have learned about the perception the U.S. has of people and the movements they drive. Nobody will be surprised to read that the power in Russia is really in the hands of Vladimir Putin and not Dmitry Medvedev; readers will find it amusing that the author of the diplomatic note called the latter Robin … and the former Batman. Nobody will be surprised either to see that Americans consider the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi “feckless, vain and ineffective,” or the French President Nicholas Sarkozy, “susceptible and authoritarian.” We have already thought as much for a long while.

What is more of a concern is the obsession that the U.S. government has in getting their hands on information that we imagine could be used to embarrass or gag U.N. dignitaries, even including General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon. We realize that behind these friendly smiles, warm handshakes and qualifiers like “unswerving friendship,” they are playing tough in the diplomatic corridors. Nobody is nice to anyone.

But there is no need to be on the backs of Americans. Indeed, there has been a breach in the security services which allowed one employee — who might be a defense analyst — to get his hands on internal documents and to pass them to the WikiLeaks website. But let us not be scandalized; if ever similar notes from Russia, China or France were to come to light, they would probably not be nicer than these.

For a few years the political and diplomatic class will play a tight hand with the Americans, who have lost some credibility in this exercise. And then a new generation will gradually enter the stage in this restricted circle, and time will do its job of forgetting.

We might learn a lesson from this story: since the arrival of information technology and the popularity of means of global communications like the Internet, the cult of secrecy no longer exists. Any government that does not want a piece of information to leak has only one thing to do: not consign it in writing!