Like everyone else, I have poured over the latest cache of Wikileaks – the publication of which I find irresponsible and destructive. There are several pieces of information now in the public domain that will cause the US diplomatic embarrassment or worse may even help the regimes in Tehran, Pyongyang and Moscow.
Just ask yourself a few questions. Will the West be safer if the Saudi leader cannot trust that a conversation he has with a US envoy will remain secret? Will that help or hinder Iran’s nuclear prpgramme? Will US-German links be improved by the knowledge that US diplomats are sceptical of Angela Merkel’s policies? Will that aid G20 coordination or hamper it? Is it going to aid stability in Pakistan that some in the US government worry about the safety of the country’s nuclear facilities? The pressure on Pakistan’s president will probably now increase – with greater instability likely to result.
The leaks will hurt the US and its relations with its allies – even though all governments engage in the same kind of behaviour. (It is hard to imagine that the German ambassador in Washington DC did not have a few critical things to say about George W Bush).
Whatever else he is, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is an anti-American agitator of the worst kind, whose attention is better focused on exposing the behaviour of authoritarian states than the internal reporting of US diplomacy. Sadly, there is little chance of that. In the warped, left-wing and now web-enabled universe that the Wikileaks founder inhabits, the US is as bad as Iran.
Comments