A remarkably broad consensus has formed that WikiLeaks' latest data dump is a diplomatic disaster for the U.S. While there are debates over how the Obama Administration should respond, everyone agrees that the revelations have weakened America. But have they?

The State Department isn’t happy about having its confidential, top-secret cables blasted across the Internet by Wikileaks, but there’s no going back now, so it should embrace its new transparency...let’s look at the upside of this forced transparency. Cablegate may be for the State Department what Top Gun was for the Air Force — a great recruitment tool.

In the past three years Anne W. Patterson, the US ambassador to Pakistan until October, has dealt with a weak civilian government, a recalcitrant military, a stockpile of not very strictly guarded highly enriched uranium (as per the latest release of ambassadors’ cables by WikiLeaks), the Taliban, a war in the country on the west, and regular flare ups with the neighbor on the east.

Secrets are as old as states, and so are enemies’, critics’ and busybodies’ efforts to uncover them. But the impact and scale of the latest disclosures by WikiLeaks, a secretive and autocratic outfit that campaigns for openness, are on a new level.

Of all the world leaders featured in the WikiLeaks cables, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has probably been the most positive about the revelations, saying, "The documents show many sources backing Israel's assessments, particularly of Iran." All the same, the documents present the voluble Israeli leader in some illuminating candid moments.

But what about our diplomatic mission in Canada? What untold secrets do their classified communications reveal to the world? Now that those cables have been released, we finally know: Canada is a pretty dull place to be a U.S. diplomat.

How will this week's release of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.org impact U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, Pakistan, and elsewhere? Six CFR experts are unanimous in cautioning that WikiLeaks' latest data dump could hurt sensitive relationships and make open exchanges more difficult.

The online release of a quarter of a million classified U.S. diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks organization has stirred up a world of controversy. Days after the release, with world leaders and U.S. government officials scrambling to exercise damage control, journalists and experts continue to pick over the revelations for the most revealing tidbits about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.