“Open covenants openly arrived at” wrote President Woodrow Wilson nearly a hundred years ago. Well, his aspiration seems to be coming true as a huge amount of U.S. diplomatic activity is laid bare in the media. A goldmine for the media of course and every diplomat's worst nightmare. But despite the understandable glee in the media at this unprecedented and unexpected windfall the consequences go much further than the embarrassment associated with for example the publication of MPs' expenses which are a clear example of justifiable public interest not least in publicizing wrongdoing. The embarrassment caused a few years back by the publication of my description at a private conference of President Bush as “al-Qaeda's best recruiting sergeant” remained just that.

What is at issue here is the ability of nations to conduct business with each other in a way which enhances international security. Diplomacy despite the many opportunities it offers for parody (Ferrero Rochet adverts and the like) is basically not a game for the mandarin class but a worthwhile exercise in trying to resolve conflict usually but not always between states. Al-Qaeda have after all triggered more conflict than anyone else in the past 10 years despite not being a state.
The ability to handle these conflicts rests very often on, yes that dirty word secret agreements. How was the Vietnam war brought to a close? a secret agreement between Le Duc Tho the north Vietnamese negotiator and Henry Kissinger. The Good Friday agreement would not have been reached if the negotiations had been taking place in public. Even President Wilson's avowed preference for transparency didn't survive his experience of the Versailles peace conference where all big decisions were taken by Lloyd George, President Clemenceau of France and Wilson himself. Even allies were left in the dark.
The real loss here is that hard to define or quantify factor, trust. Once gone it's very hard to regain as people find in their private lives. So in diplomacy, a leader who tells a U.S. ambassador that he hopes the U.S. will follow a particular course of action, will have offered that advice with the confidence that his views will not be played back to a third party.
Whoever is responsible, the Saudis and many countries around the world will think very carefully before volunteering frank views about other countries and their leaders to U.S. diplomats, just as I never spoke again to the journalist who, in printing my comments on Bush, had betrayed the trust shown in inviting her to a not-for-attribution private conference.
It beggars belief that a disaffected 22-year-old intelligence analyst could have stolen so prolifically from the state department archive. It is larceny on a grand scale but a consequence of a lax system in which millions (2.3 million? nobody seems to know) have access to cable traffic classified secret and above. While we have to assume that Hillary Clinton will take appropriate measures to ensure that from now on the circulation of sensitive rather than embarrassing information is suitably restricted in the interests of national and international security, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle: U.S. diplomats may find future pickings from their diplomatic contacts rather meager.
And while some have seen the WikiLeaks as a bonanza for historians, historians of the next era of history may have cause to curse. Diplomats who gain access to or are given a particularly valuable or sensitive piece of information will be extremely reluctant to record it given the blow to confidence in the security of confidential messaging systems. Such information may well be passed predominantly orally by secure phone with no transcribed version kept. Inconvenient perhaps but safe.
We could be entering a period of history as in the ancient world where people relied on the oral tradition and eventually wrote down some time later what they thought people might have said or thought. Did Thucydides actually hear Pericles' funeral oration or was he repeating what others had told him about it? Through a process of Chinese whispers messages can be transmogrified beyond recognition.
(Source: The Guardian)