The calls for Hillary Clinton to resign as Secretary of State following the WikiLeaks release of State Department cables placed her in an unusual political position: defending her department from unauthorized disclosures whose content, read carefully, mostly demonstrated the competence and sophistication of American diplomacy rather than its corruption.

The argument for resignation was structural rather than substantive. The argument went: the Secretary of State is responsible for her department's security protocols; those protocols had failed in a catastrophic and embarrassing way; therefore the Secretary should accept accountability and resign. This argument applies standard executive accountability norms to a failure whose actual cause — the behavior of a low-level analyst in a military network connected to, but not run by, the State Department — was considerably removed from the Secretary's direct responsibility.

Clinton's response was characteristically direct. She defended the cables as evidence of American diplomacy working rather than failing, acknowledged the security failure as serious, and declined to treat the situation as one that warranted her departure. The political reading of the moment supported her position: there was no serious domestic political pressure for her resignation, and the foreign governments whose cables had been released were focused on managing the diplomatic fallout rather than demanding her accountability.

The WikiLeaks cables, read in bulk, present a portrait of American foreign policy that is both more nuanced and more human than the public diplomacy of the same period. Ambassadors writing frankly about foreign leaders, analysts noting the gap between what officials say publicly and privately, diplomats navigating the distance between American values and the realities of working with allies whose practices do not reflect those values — these are the ordinary materials of diplomacy, and their exposure was an embarrassment of candor rather than of wrongdoing.