Andrew Roberts: The British Empire's WikiLeaks
[Historian Andrew Roberts' latest book, Masters and Commanders, was published in the UK in September. His previous books include Napoleon and Wellington, Hitler and Churchill, and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.]
It might not afford much solace for Hillary Clinton as she tries to minimize the appalling damage done by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, but much the same thing happened to the British Empire at the height of its power and prestige in 1878, and that incident could provide a way forward for her, should she have the magisterial self-confidence to take it.
The sheer rudeness of several of the WikiLeaks cables may be excruciatingly embarrassing for all the people involved, but that is the way most countries’ diplomats talk when they don’t think anyone’s listening. The greatest British ambassadors of the Victorian age—such as Sir William White in Constantinople, Lord Dufferin in St. Petersburg, and Lord Lytton in Paris—could be immensely caustic in their private reports back home. In the days before “joined up government” and electronic communication, they were very unlikely to be caught out. “The Tsar is stupid,” the Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury wrote to the British ambassador in Vienna in 1885, “Prince Bismarck’s nerves have become a little excitable, and there is a dark uncertain future which creates a constant state of inchoate panic.” Good relations with Russia and Germany would have been deeply compromised if any of his hundreds of remarks of that nature had ever been made public, or even his milder statement about the Russian Foreign Minister Gortschakov, that: “If some kindly fit of gout were to take him off we would move much faster.”...
Read entire article at The Daily Beast
It might not afford much solace for Hillary Clinton as she tries to minimize the appalling damage done by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, but much the same thing happened to the British Empire at the height of its power and prestige in 1878, and that incident could provide a way forward for her, should she have the magisterial self-confidence to take it.
The sheer rudeness of several of the WikiLeaks cables may be excruciatingly embarrassing for all the people involved, but that is the way most countries’ diplomats talk when they don’t think anyone’s listening. The greatest British ambassadors of the Victorian age—such as Sir William White in Constantinople, Lord Dufferin in St. Petersburg, and Lord Lytton in Paris—could be immensely caustic in their private reports back home. In the days before “joined up government” and electronic communication, they were very unlikely to be caught out. “The Tsar is stupid,” the Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury wrote to the British ambassador in Vienna in 1885, “Prince Bismarck’s nerves have become a little excitable, and there is a dark uncertain future which creates a constant state of inchoate panic.” Good relations with Russia and Germany would have been deeply compromised if any of his hundreds of remarks of that nature had ever been made public, or even his milder statement about the Russian Foreign Minister Gortschakov, that: “If some kindly fit of gout were to take him off we would move much faster.”...