Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, whose life has been a saga of defiance of what America stands for has every reason to feel satisfied at the global discomfiture Washington is experiencing in the wake of latest round of WikiLeaks.

He and many like him, who have dedicated their lives to struggle against capitalism and American imperialism cannot be faulted for their exuberance since the authenticity of WikiLeaks has not been put into doubt by anyone, the Americans including.

But the jury is still out to decide whether the trove of ‘classified and secret’ US diplomatic cables is a “colossal scandal” for the United States, as Fidel Castro would like the world to believe.

One thing is clear though.

There are no fascinating or titillating details in ‘the revelations’, which are no more than spiced up media reports. And in that sense, the documents do embarrass the US, complicate its foreign policy and make its State Department quickly scramble for a secure alternative to ‘cables’. 

Whether it is issues related to terrorism, terror beehives in Pakistan, Saudi reservations of Pak President Zardari, Saudi’s view of neighbour Yemen as a failed state where President Ali Abdullah Saleh is losing control, and the US diplomats snooping of foreign officials particularly at the UN headquarters are in the realm of public domain in one form or the other. 

And it is for this reason American foreign policy has been viewed in several circles over the years as an enigma. It has been enigmatic because of the yawning gulf between what Washington has said and did on record and the buzz in its own diplomatic cocktail circuit.

In the foreign policy pursued by any country, private conversations are often at odds with public pronouncements.

But, WikiLeaks shows that in the context of the United States of America, not often but as a matter of routine,  public pronouncements are at variance with the assessments conveyed by it diplomats as their human intelligence input.   

What the Obama administration should do now? Well, while trying to handle post-WikiLeaks disquiet gracefully, it should, as the LA Times said editorially, needs to take responsibility for safeguarding information at its source and resist the temptation to rail against WikiLeaks, or the news media.