The Foreign Affairs magazine has reluctanly joined the recent uproar against WikiLeaks by republishing an article by Monteagle Stearns (an ambassador under Nixon and Reagan, Wikipedia tells us) with a short note prefaced saying,

The recent publication of purloined State Department cables was a strike against not only American foreign policy, but against diplomacy itself.

I use ForAff pretty often with my IR students due to exceedingly good English and somewhat interesting expert opinions, so after getting an email update I duly headed to the site only to find that the article is subscription-only.

Besides the obvious fact that it’s an interesting strategy of joining the fray when you republish a 37-year old piece (or maybe Stearns refers to the Ellsberg case there?), the very choice of form is symbolic. An article billed as defending diplomatic secrecy is itself not available to the interested reader until he pays for it. This is a curious mix of traditional diplonacy, traditional business, traditional journalism and everything traditional thrown together.

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