WikiLeaks 'attack': How damaging to US foreign relations?

The US intensified its efforts at damage control on Monday following the publication by WikiLeaks of more than a quarter-million diplomatic cables, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calling the massive release not just a problem for American foreign policy but “an attack on the international community.”

In a statement to journalists in the State Department’s Treaty Room before she was to leave on a four-country trip through Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, Secretary Clinton said that both the furthering of US national interests and the operation of the world’s international political system depend on thousands of confidential exchanges, assessments, and conversations every day.

Far from being a “laudable” effort to make the workings of government transparent, the leaking of classified cables, she said, can have a chilling effect on such US foreign policy goals as the promotion of human rights or expansion of religious freedoms by discouraging the foreign proponents of those goals from working with the US.