Courtesy of WikiLeaks, the European Parliament can feel vindicated for pushing this spring for stronger US protection of data on Europeans’ bank transfers. If American officials handle so loosely so much information sensitive to their nation’s interests, how much more carelessly would they protect the data of anonymous individual foreigners? 

And it is in the area of security that publication of the cables most clearly does damage to EU-US relations. In one instance, the ‘war on terror’, the damage is mainly a result of old policies, though recent bait offered to persuade EU states to give homes to Guantánamo Bay detainees may seem distasteful (for example, an audience with President Barack Obama for the Slovenian president).

More worrying is a clear overstep of the blurry red line between diplomacy and spying – a request to collect the biometric data of Slovenian, Hungarian and Romanian politicians. This is doubly unsettling because the orders came during the administration of Obama, who was elected in part to end the questionable practices of the past.

More damage will surely be done: just nine of the cables released so far were sent by the US mission to the EU in Brussels; thousands more await. But what is mostly evident at the moment is a foreign service doing its (very good) best to document a very dangerous world and identify deals. In the process, US diplomats bump into painful realities. On 24 November 2009, one suggests that “Belgium can be a leader in mobilizing Europe to assist the United States in…Afghanistan”; on 23 December 2009, another reports that Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium’s prime minister until one month earlier and the European Council’s president in waiting, thought that “no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore”.

So far, there is little damage to the EU itself. Its reluctance about engagement in Afghanistan was well known. We see evidence, from Spain, of the vanity of nations (through its futile bid for a US summit during its EU presidency) and of a lack of European solidarity (Spain’s prime minister probably helped GE beat Rolls-Royce to a deal), but neither vanity nor self-interest is novel.

We read Van Rompuy describing the Cancún climate talks as “doomed”. But is this damaging to talks, or a useful alert? And, faced with this depressing reality, we see old principles buckling. The Netherlands, a generous giver of aid, is now considering linking aid to climate action. But this is buckling under extreme pressure: the Netherlands is, after all, profoundly vulnerable to rising seas.

Some may fear private honesty will carry a cost. Vladimir Putin might not appreciate the aperçu of a former European commissioner, Chris Patten, that he has “the eyes of a killer”. But on the other hand, the cables say, Russia was “harshly and condescendingly” dismissive of European Commission President José Manuel Barroso as “basically a glorified international civil servant”.

We see hypocrisy about the resettlement of Guantánamo detainees, with EU states refusing to be stablehands cleaning up the Augean stable created by the ‘war on terror’, though a good number of them helped to dirty the stable. But most European publics are happier to live with hypocrisy than with former detainees.

And, of course, the EU contributes a leading character to a carnival of grotesques: Silvio Berlusconi, revealed here in just some of his vividness, but with a new allegation – that he benefited financially from Russian contracts.

The EU has so far escaped lightly. For the most part, the cables detail the intricate task of aligning 27 states and EU institutions, and of positions within positions. Consider an account, derived from a British source, of a meeting between Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. The French president wants and the UK prime minister rejects “a new Sarkozy proposal for an ‘EU President’”; later, Sarkozy objects to a European commissioner (Peter Mandelson) negotiating for the EU in trade talks, while Blair supports him. So the country ostensibly advocating a strengthening of the EU’s institutions is also less willing to concede sovereignty. Understandable to the insider, perhaps, but also enough to befuddle outsiders.

Is the detailing of such intricacy damaging? Voters tend not to appreciate complexity and, certainly, not all quid pro quos that will emerge will look palatable.

The EU may, though, be among the least susceptible to damage. It is, after all, a highly organised forum for bargaining, offering an unusually wide scope for deal-making and limiting the chances of changing the game. The public assumes there will be quid pro quos – and many governments want their voters to know what they got.

It is when trade-offs are more sensitive and the principles tested are fundamental that the damage may be greatest – in other words, security and external affairs. With the exception of Berlusconi, there are few suggestions of the EU trading interests off against European values. The more cables, the more likely the tests – but even then, since most cables pre-date the Lisbon treaty, the blame can be pinned squarely on errant member states.

WikiLeaks, though, poses more than just problems. It poses the EU a challenge: would such a leak five years from now show a common EU foreign policy?