Why Wikileaks is bad for liberal foreign policy

Making the Hardest Diplomatic Work Harder

I spent almost a decade working at the State Department and overseas. After reading through these files, I cannot stop imagining just how hard it will be for Foreign Service Officers to do their jobs. One former Officer, Alex Grossman, summed it up for me nicely: “fear of publication will only prevent people from voicing frank and honest opinions, assessments and recommendations.”

And it’s not just that U.S. officials will have to be careful about what they say or write. It’s that they’ll be dealing with foreign officials living with the same fear of exposure. In the Middle East, as Marc Lynch notes, Arab leaders may already be dealing with blowback in their own countries, for offering the US frank assessments of one other. Russian leaders are likely to get skittish about continuing the depth of intelligence-sharing they’ve moved to under the current Administration, as Sam Charap of the Center for American Progress noted…