Who Won Wikileaks?

The latest round of WikiLeaks documents thoroughly debunk the hopes that the threat from Iran and North Korea can be negotiated away.

Noah Pollak argues on FrumForum today that Wikileaks represents a disaster for the leftist-realist tendency in U.S. foreign policy.

Wikileaks… is quickly obliterating the Gulf-side Middle East worldview of the leftist-realists.

They said the Palestinians are the key to pleasing the Arabs — but in private, we now know that the Arabs barely ever mention Palestine. They said that the Israelis manipulate our foreign policy — but we now know that the Arabs were the ones openly calling for the U.S. to start a war with Iran. They said that America’s closeness with Israel alienates the Arabs — but we now know that what’s really alienating the Arabs is America’s reluctance to use its power to confront Iran and enforce a security architecture in which Israel is America’s most capable client.

Heather Hurlburt - former Clinton speechwriter, now executive director of a liberal foreign policy group - has posted that she agrees with Noah Pollak:

[B]ack here within the U.S., you can count upon the opponents of progressive policies to use the Wikileaks dumps to advance their agenda. They'll take items out of context and use them to justify ideas like bombing Iran, rejecting the START treaty, and god-knows-what to North Korea.

"Out of context" here seems mere throat-clearing. It should be stressed: Bombing Iran remains a very tough call. But these documents thoroughly debunk the hopes that the threat from Iran and North Korea can somehow be negotiated away. They likewise discredit the illusion that some other issue - Guantanamo? Israeli settlements? - matters more to regional security. We're back where we were in 2002: Iran and North Korea are working together to threaten the peace of the world. Only the US and its president can form the coalition to stop them.