What the cables tell us about Europe
All that gathering. All that note-taking. Hundreds of thousands of cables arriving electronically in Foggy Bottom in Washington.
On the surface the Wikileaks revelations are the stuff of asides at diplomatic receptions. President Sarkozy has a "thin-skinned and authoritative style". Chancellor Merkel is "risk-averse". David Cameron is seen as "lacking depth". Prime Minister Berlusconi is regarded as "vain". As for Vladimir Putin, well he's the "alpha dog".
The United States has always attached great importance to understanding leaders. The CIA employed for many years - and probably still does - a team of psychiatrists whose job it was to analyse the inner lives of men like Cuba's Fidel Castro and former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. They wanted every detail about what they ate, who they loved, about the state of their health. It was a question of "know your enemy".
Even with friends, Americans have an insatiable appetite to know. More often than not what is delivered are snap judgements that diplomats, politicians and journalists make all the time.
Whether it was right to publish is a separate question. We often have no way of knowing the context in which these notes were made. Some flesh out character. But contained within these diplomatic sketches are serious issues, and in Europe there could still be fall-out from these revelations.
The Americans clearly see Angela Merkel as by far the most important leader in Europe. There has not been a German leader as powerful and influential probably since World War II. Yet the cables don't warm to her. They find her "risk-averse and rarely creative". She is the "ultimate Teflon politician", who seems to avoid bad news sticking to her. Less flatteringly, one cable says that she "promotes incompetent people to make her look better". She is "circumspect" and "unimaginative".
Certainly her style is to move cautiously, as was revealed at the start of the eurozone crisis, when she hesitated over whether to abandon the EU's "no bail-out" commitment and help Greece. When cornered, the American diplomats say, she can be tenacious. The eurozone crisis has revealed her taking a tough line but retreating under pressure.
But step-by-step she is moulding Europe to the German way, where countries have to live within their means or face severe consequences.
Apart from the fact that the chief of staff in her foreign minister's office was passing information to the Americans she, on this viewing, will not be unhappy with what has been revealed so far.
An early judgement going back to 2005 is that Nicolas Sarkozy is pro-American. He is "very much unlike nearly all other French political figures, Sarkozy is viscerally pro-American," reads one cable.
There is a revealing passage where Sarkozy talks about himself to a diplomat. "They call me Sarkozy the American," he said. "They consider it an insult but I take it as a compliment." The cable goes on to say that "Sarkozy said how much he 'recognised himself' in America's values".
But for that, the Americans are wary. "Just being in the same room with Sarkozy is enough to make anyone's stress levels rise." He is described as autocratic, over-sensitive to criticism and surrounds himself with "yes" men. He is an emperor without clothes.
It is not a damning assessment, but these portraits will feed into the minds of the voters when they decide whether or not to re-elect Sarkozy in 2012.
The American assessment of Italy's Silvio Berlusconi is more serious. On the one hand a charge d'affaires notes that he has a "penchant for partying hard (which) means he does not get sufficient rest". They see him as "physically and politically weak". He is seen as " feckless, vain and ineffective".
But there is much more here than a pencil-sketch of another leader. The ambassador to Rome, Ronald Spogli, reports two years ago that Berlusconi has taken "single-handed" control of Italy's dealings with Moscow. He is described as the "mouthpiece of Putin". The Putin family is reported to be "spending long visits at the Berlusconi mansion in Sardinia at Berlusconi's expense". The two men are seen as "tycoon oligarchs".
The Italian leader is portrayed as championing every Russian initiative. He consistently "rejects the advice of a demoralised, resource-starved and increasingly irrelevant foreign ministry, in favour of his business cronies".
And then a suspicion. A US diplomat wonders whether Berlusconi was "personally and handsomely" profiting from energy deals with Moscow. Last week Berlusconi insisted that "there has never been a single personal interest" in his contacts with Russia.
These are serious issues and come at a dangerous time for the Italian leader. Next week he faces a vote of confidence. The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, tried to soften the damage by describing him as "the best friend of America", but the cables are out there. If he has to resign it won't be because of the cables, but Italians will feel a pang of embarrassment at how outsiders see their leader.
Then there is a meeting between a US ambassador and Herman Van Rompuy, just after he has been appointed President of the EU Council. Van Rompuy says the Europeans have all but given up on the Afghanistan mission. He says the EU no longer believes in success in Afghanistan and that troops are there "out of deference to the US". "No one believes in Afghanistan anymore," he continues. And he adds that "if a Belgian gets killed, it would be over for Belgium".
It is hard to know the full context of this conversation, but it raises disturbing questions: the implication that servicemen and women are giving their lives for a political gesture; that troops are being deployed on a mission no one believes in; that a nation might cut and run after a single casualty.
Herman Van Rompuy was dismissive of the current climate change conference in Cancun. "It would be a disaster as well (as Copenhagen)," he predicted. His concerns about Copenhagen were less about what had been achieved for the planet but more that Europe had been "totally excluded" and "mistreated".
"Had I been there," he continued, "my presidency would have been over before it began". The EU leadership does not like large multi-national conferences but would prefer a world where the EU and US reach an understanding and then talk to the Chinese.
What this brief cable underlines is the determination in Brussels to promote Europe as a player on the world stage. Van Rompuy told the ambassador that he "planned to take control of getting Europe on the same page".
And, of course, that won't be easy. Why? Well, the answer lies in the other cables that reveal Europe's leaders as big personalities who very much follow their own agendas.
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