Today’s startling leak comes courtesy of the Washington Post, which provides us with transcripts of two phone calls between President Trump and foreign leaders. Both were the subjects of news stories early on in the administration. We heard about the ugliness erupting between Trump and Australian PM Turnbull that resulted in a presidential hang-up 35 minutes early. And Trump himself spoke of a phone conversation with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in which the border wall was discussed.
The transcripts are fascinating and disturbing. For a certain type of person—I am that type of person—they are as delicious as a hot fudge sundae. You can go find them and read them. I’m not going to provide a link because I think their leak to the press is a scandal and a catastrophe for the good working order of the world. I don’t blame the Washington Post; these days there’s no suppressing information, and had it not run them, someone else would have. Are they newsworthy? Of course, they’re newsworthy by dint of the fact that we’ve hardly ever seen such a thing before. Do they tell us things about our president we profit from knowing? Sure. We learn, for example, that he knows the “wall” is a cynical ploy but needs Mexico to agree to pay for it because he backed himself into a corner saying it would.
But we shouldn’t be reading them. We really shouldn’t. It’s not because they might be embarrassing to Trump, though they are. It’s not because any president deserves to have a staff loyal enough to him not to release highly sensitive information for whatever reason the leaker might have, though he should. It’s because the leaders of other countries need to know that if they have private and candid conversations with the president of the United States, they will not be putting their country’s relationship with the U.S. or their own relationship with their own people at risk due to their candor.
A president’s interactions with the leaders of other countries are asymmetrical. America is the most powerful nation on earth. Mexico and Australia are not. It’s news in a foreign capital when a deputy assistant secretary of state gives a speech there—days of news, during which that country’s pundits and politicians comb through that relatively unimportant American official’s words looking for clues about America’s feelings about and relations with it. A one-on-one with a president might have the power to topple a government if his candid interlocutor says something direct and impolitic. If such people cannot have confidence their private words remain private, there will be no candor between leaders, no serious plain talk, nothing.
We’re so used to talking about how America’s influence has fallen over the years and how little we are respected here and there and blah blah blah that we forget America bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus, and one false step can crush someone or something that we had no intention of crushing. It seems likely the leaker was so enraged by Trump he dropped this dirty dime on him to make the president look foolish. It’s not an overstatement to say that one leaker has singlehandedly introduced a new kind of instability into the international system. I hope he or she enjoys the fruits of his labors today. Then I hope he or she is exposed, and shamed, and is denied any further work in government.
This is the opposite of patriotism.
