Revenge of the Quiet American - By Maya Jasanoff | Foreign Policy

Revenge of the Quiet American - By Maya Jasanoff | Foreign Policy

The world of U.S. diplomacy as filtered through WikiLeaks looks an awful lot like a certain other Western imperial power from not too long ago.

BY MAYA JASANOFF | MARCH/APRIL 2011

The making of WikiLeaks sounds like a plot straight out of Graham Greene, with some 21st-century updates: A disgruntled Army private downloads a digital grab bag of classified documents, burns them onto sham Lady Gaga CDs, and passes them into the hackosphere, where they are published by an international man of mystery. So perhaps it shouldn't be so striking that reading the WikiLeaks archive, one gets an uncanny sensation of entering the Greeneland of Our Man in Havana or The Quiet American, in which social events merge with affairs of state, gossip is retailed as intelligence, and personality stands in for politics.

Greene wrote about the closing days of the British Empire, which began the 20th century formally encompassing a quarter of the world and informally dominating considerably more, but ended it having passed the superpower's cape to the United States. Historians have debated the precise ways in which American hegemony today does and doesn't resemble that of imperial Britain. But reading the leaked cables, there is no mistaking how much U.S. diplomats describe their milieux in terms similar to those of their British predecessors. In everything from literary style to subject matter, this accidental repository would not seem out of place among the records of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, now neatly boxed away in the British National Archives. Like the dispatches of British diplomats in the age of empire, these cables sketch a world of international rivalry, full of thrusting ambition and the abundant eccentricities of things foreign.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,