News

The main thing about the latest trove of secretWikiLeaks documents is this: It exists, it's out there for the world to see, and it would be regardless of whether the editors of the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and El País chose to print the news (and much of this trove is newsworthy) or shut their eyes.

So let's pretend for a moment that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, was motivated not by a messianic, anti-American, cyberanarchistic glee ("I enjoy crushing bastards," he once told an interviewer) but by a desire to show us how the world really works.

 Beyond the questions surrounding the massive nature of their disclosure—right or wrong, catastrophic or merely embarrassing—what do these documents reveal about U.S. foreign policy and the nature of diplomacy?