This tension, or rather panic, is obviously explained by the magnitude of the WikiLeaks revelations. Experience shows that relevant news can be buried under an avalanche of information. That's one of the handicaps of the current serialised revelations. The piecemeal delivery of the diplomatic cables combines the essential with the non-essential, conclusive facts with those of relative import and revelations with confirmation of the already known. Also inevitable is the delay in public awareness of the importance of the vast amount of ever-teeming information supplied by WikiLeaks, throughout 2010, since last April's very first leak of this video which shows US troops killing civilians in Iraq and which was highly embarrassing to the US Army.
From the onset, there was a risk that unveiling the information would become the focus of attention with media not taking the time to examine the most revealing and therefore the most conclusive information. Such is the case of the secret cables signed in April 2009 and July 2009 by Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration's Secretary of State. These cables request the systematic espionage of United Nations officials, of the entourage of the UN Secretary-General and of diplomats from selected regions, notably Africa. By providing the proof that the United States turns its embassies into operational branches of its surveillance network, this information is scandalous in and of itself and brutally belies the pretence by the Democratic president that he incarnates a new era of international relations. It is therefore not astonishing that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described the pressure put on WikiLeaks as a type of censure.
The purloined data thus demanded by Hillary Clinton from State Department officials concerns "biometric data" on African leaders including their "fingerprints, identification photos, DNA, retinal scans" and other highly personal information. It also concerns such data as the passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, and frequent flyer account numbers of "key UN officials" including the delegations of the permanent members of the Security Council. Even if this is merely the glaring confirmation of already known practices - in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was spied upon by the administration of George W. Bush - it is no less scandalous. Is it justifiable for the United Nations, where conversations are, in theory, discrete and where diplomatic negotiations and discussions are carried out in confidence, to be transformed into a nest of spies by a major democratic nation?
Regarding France and the upcoming 2012 presidential campaign, it would be wrong to minimise the revelations unveiled by the cables concerning French support for American errors. The cables show the secret support by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, which he has never publically admitted, to the Bush administration during the darkest hours of the post-September 11th wartime adventure at a time when the administration's approval of torture and of extraordinary rendition was already public. The cables also revealed that the French Socialist Party (PS) remains aligned on the US's imperialist positions despite public statements to the contrary. Both Pierre Moscovici, then the PS's International Affairs Secretary, and former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, rushed to the US embassy to confide their condemnation of the refusal to join in the invasion of Iraq taken at the time by French President Jacques Chirac and his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. Even François Holland, then PS First Secretary, told the US ambassador in 2006 that, should it come to power, the party's position would certainly not be the same as Tony Blair's but that it would not be that of Jacques Chirac either - despite the consensus in France on this issue.
To take the full measure of the WikiLeaks revelations, these must be sorted through with care. They show that the US stands a far cry from the disinterested image it tries to promote and is instead mired in national self-interest, following narrowly selfish diplomatic aims rather than being open to the complexity and diversity of an independent world. This exposure has revealed a nation blind to the new challenges of the 21st Century, obsessed by its rank in the world and the possibility of losing that rank at a time when it should be concerned with creating a new balance of power on a planet in which the US will have to learn to relate to others. This applies not only to China, but to all the major democracies emerging in the former Third World and which are tracing their own paths now that they are free of the binary choices imposed by the polarisation of the US and the Soviet Union.
In other words, the serialised revelations of WikiLeaks tell the story of a world seeking a new centre, a world shifting to new foundations which will not be those that the United States or the European Union thought they would be in the heady days of 1989-1991, when history provided a divine surprise with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The attack on the World Trade Center ten years later, a response to those two events, destroyed all illusions born of that change. At the same time, the superpower discovered, to its astonishment, its own glaring weakness. Looking at things from a new angle helps to understand the impact of ‘cablegate'. While US and EU officials decry the scandal, the rest of the world rejoices and approves.
On his official blog, Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva posted a video in support of Julian Assange's cause. Expressing to WikiLeaks his "solidarity for the disclosure of documents" he congratulated the site's founder for "having exposed a diplomacy that seemed untouchable". And Lula, who will step down as president of Brazil in January, asked internet users to post their support in defence of "freedom of expression" on his blog. It's not fortuitous that the democratic state of Brazil, led by its Labour Party, in a move since followed by other Latin-American nations, recently recognized the 1967 borders of the Palestinian State thus showing its impatience with US powerlessness and complacency in the face of Israel's scandalous policies
Turning to another major democratic nation, India, whose diplomatic policies are close to those of Brazil, especially on nuclear issues and Iran, the press defends WikiLeaks willingly and without reservation. English-language daily, The Hindu, for example, the newspaper of record from Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India, denounced "digital McCarthyism" in a December 6th editorial and firmly defended WikiLeaks. "The intolerant response to WikiLeaks is a potential threat to all media and must be fought," the editorial said. Not all the support for the leaks comes from bona fide democrats, as demonstrated by Vladimir Putin's suggestion to award the next Nobel Peace Prize to Julian Assange. But what they do share is a perception of what is being played out beyond the media hype: the exposure of US power, of it arrogance and its blind-spots but also, paradoxically, of its powerlessness and weaknesses.
An event that nearly passed without notice demonstrated this context the day after the unveiling of the cables. On November 29th, President Barak Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report called Accelerating the Pace of Change in Energy Technologies Through an Integrated Federal Energy Policy. The report was a response to concerns expressed by the White House through the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu. To sum up his position in a single metaphor, Chu said that the US finds itself at a new "Sputnik moment," an allusion to the feeling in the US of lagging behind when the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. This is, ultimately, is the true reality of the WikiLeaks revelations; they have unveiled that the US is unsure of its power, concerned that it is lagging behind in terms of technology, bogged down in its alliances, trapped in its contradictions and, most of all, overwhelmed by its past failings.
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