Wikileaks Undercuts What It Is Alleged To Support

At NewsBusters, Lachlan Markay writes that though Wikileaks is supposed to bring about peace, it will in fact have the opposite effect:

[Michael] Moore declared (to some unnamed person) that "every cable, every email you write is now fair game." And that is exactly what Assange is going for. But the endgame is not openness. It's exactly the opposite. Because every internal communication is now "fair game," State officials will surely communicate less information internally.

Moore also claimed that "No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed." But that's not right; folks can plot the next Big Lie all they want, they just can't keep a record of the plot. That makes the system more opaque, not transparent.

And though it won't improve transparency, the breakdown in internal communications will handicap the State Department. With enough leaks, Assange hopes, internal communication will break down entirely and the diplomatic community will be unable to function.

And what happens when diplomacy is impossible? Among other things, there will be more physical conflict where disagreements cannot be worked out peacefully (and peaceful conflict resolution is the entire purpose of diplomacy). Assange may or may not understand that fact.

As the New Republic's James Rubin wrote early this month,

By and large, the hard left in America and around the world would prefer to see the peaceful resolution of disputes rather than the use of military force. World peace, however, is a lot harder to achieve if the U.S. State Department is cut off at the knees. And that is exactly what this mass revelation of documents is going to do. The essential tool of State Department diplomacy is trust between American officials and their foreign counterparts. Unlike the Pentagon, which has military forces, or the Treasury Department, which has financial tools, the State Department functions mainly by winning the trust of foreign officials, sharing information, and persuading. Those discussions have to be confidential to be successful. Destroying confidentiality means destroying diplomacy.

And destroying diplomacy means that fewer international conflicts will be resolved diplomatically (in both senses of the term). That, in turn, means they will either be left to fester unaddressed, or will be resolved militarily.

About the only indisputable benefit of the Wikileaks revelations is that it gives bloggers extra material to write about...

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