Derek Leebaert: Our Envoys, Ourselves
[Derek Leebaert, a management consultant, is the author of “Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan.”]
A GLOBAL power’s diplomatic archives are inevitably full of caustic dispatches. In Britain, a new batch of Foreign Office records is declassified each January under the “30-year rule” (a “50-year rule” before 1968). Historians can peruse elegantly handwritten mockeries of President Eisenhower’s name as exotically Eastern European, or files deriding Americans as the planet’s “most excitable” people — other than Bangladeshis....
A century ago, a foreign journalist asked the theatrical impresario Charles Frohman why one saw only actors’ names on Broadway marquees, whereas in Paris the names in lights were those of playwrights. Frohman explained that in America, the emphasis is always on the doer, not the thing done: “There are stars in every walk of American life. It has always been so in democracies.” It remains true today: as the most individualistic of all democracies, America creates, rewards, obsesses over stars of every kind and intensely extols personal success.
WikiLeaks has shown how these enthusiasms play out overseas. The pages of the leaked cables hum with high-level gossip and trenchant cameos. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany “avoids risk and is seldom creative”; a “penchant for partying hard” has left Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy “a complete mess”; President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is thin-skinned and has “monarchial tendencies”; Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia is like a Mafia godfather but also “resents or resists the workload he carries.”...
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A GLOBAL power’s diplomatic archives are inevitably full of caustic dispatches. In Britain, a new batch of Foreign Office records is declassified each January under the “30-year rule” (a “50-year rule” before 1968). Historians can peruse elegantly handwritten mockeries of President Eisenhower’s name as exotically Eastern European, or files deriding Americans as the planet’s “most excitable” people — other than Bangladeshis....
A century ago, a foreign journalist asked the theatrical impresario Charles Frohman why one saw only actors’ names on Broadway marquees, whereas in Paris the names in lights were those of playwrights. Frohman explained that in America, the emphasis is always on the doer, not the thing done: “There are stars in every walk of American life. It has always been so in democracies.” It remains true today: as the most individualistic of all democracies, America creates, rewards, obsesses over stars of every kind and intensely extols personal success.
WikiLeaks has shown how these enthusiasms play out overseas. The pages of the leaked cables hum with high-level gossip and trenchant cameos. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany “avoids risk and is seldom creative”; a “penchant for partying hard” has left Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy “a complete mess”; President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is thin-skinned and has “monarchial tendencies”; Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia is like a Mafia godfather but also “resents or resists the workload he carries.”...