Or Just On the Other Side?

James Rubin at The New Republic complains that Wikileaks’s document drop of U. S. diplomatic communications doesn’t further the cabal’s own objectives:

By and large, the hard left in America and around the world would prefer to see the peaceful resolution of disputes rather than the use of military force. World peace, however, is a lot harder to achieve if the U.S. State Department is cut off at the knees. And that is exactly what this mass revelation of documents is going to do. The essential tool of State Department diplomacy is trust between American officials and their foreign counterparts. Unlike the Pentagon, which has military forces, or the Treasury Department, which has financial tools, the State Department functions mainly by winning the trust of foreign officials, sharing information, and persuading. Those discussions have to be confidential to be successful. Destroying confidentiality means destroying diplomacy.

I suspect that Mr. Rubin has confused the European “hard left” with the American center or center-left. Perhaps this is what comes of trying to shoehorn a system of political categorization coined when royalists opposed republicans into a time when Marxists, Maoists, anarchists, Eurosceptics, fascists, social democrats, religionists, pragmatists, and a thousand other “-ists” clamor to get their way in the political sphere.

As Glenn Reynolds has put it from time to time are they anti-war or just on the other side? Judging by their actions rather than hypothetical theories and specious affiliations, it would seem to me that the latter is more likely.

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Dave Schuler
About Dave Schuler
Over the years Dave Schuler has worked as a martial arts instructor, a handyman, a musician, a cook, and a translator. He's owned his own company for the last thirty years and has a post-graduate degree in his field. He comes from a family of politicians, teachers, and vaudeville entertainers. All-in-all a pretty good preparation for blogging. He has contributed to OTB since November 2006 but mostly writes at his own blog, The Glittering Eye, which he started in March 2004.

Comments

  1. Herb says:

    But was “increasing diplomatic trust” the cabal’s objective? (By the way, use that description more often.)

  2. PD Shaw says:

    I don’t know Mr. Rubin’s politics, but if this were 100 years ago, I’d guess he was a member of the Second International, on the chart somewhere near anarchism.  Abolition of “secret diplomacy” was a consistent aim of the pre-Soviet communists, who favored the elimination or deterioration of the nation-state for an international order.