Fred Kaplan: Diplomacy in Action
[Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.]
...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.
...[W]hat do these documents reveal about U.S. foreign policy and the nature of diplomacy?
Mainly they illustrate principles about the "great game" of power politics dating back to Thucydides—that nations behave according to their material interests and that a big part of diplomacy lies in appealing to, threatening, or manipulating those interests....
Read entire article at Slate
...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.
...[W]hat do these documents reveal about U.S. foreign policy and the nature of diplomacy?
Mainly they illustrate principles about the "great game" of power politics dating back to Thucydides—that nations behave according to their material interests and that a big part of diplomacy lies in appealing to, threatening, or manipulating those interests....