WikiLeaks exposed the trust deficiency of US diplomacy – Russian diplomat

The new WikiLeaks publication of 250,000 classified documents has disclosed the lack of confidentiality of American diplomacy, a high-ranking Russian diplomat has declared.

There’s nothing new in the fact that governments are apt to get acquainted with the secret documents of foreign countries, he said. This practice is centuries-old and in 17-18 centuries it even served to entertain the European monarchs, but never caused any harm because “they did not break the illusions that, generally speaking, did not exist,” the diplomat commented, adding that the documents published by WikiLeaks speak for themselves.The existing situation with the mass publishing of secret diplomatic documents is altogether different, the diplomat points out. The very fact that such documents have become public is an unprecedented, most regrettable, event. Inherently, it means the US government is incapable of providing confidentiality in it own diplomacy. Confidentiality is one of the most fundamental conditions, if not the key condition, of the management of international affairs, he said.In this case, the extenuating circumstances of the diplomatic leaks could be the modern condition of American society, which is highly polarized, the diplomat said, being virtually on the brink of a civil war. “It’s easy for us to understand such a situation – we do remember how the cables of our [Russian] envoys and records of conversations were published in the mass media in 1990s,” he recalled.For Russia, these new publications bring no problem at all as they add nothing to the general picture that views Russia in its current condition on a basis of instincts and prejudice and that is widespread on different levels of the American political, military and intelligence establishment, the diplomat concluded.