I am hoping to become a US diplomat myself, so I've obviously been following this pretty closely - especially the Russia-related leaks.
Here's the thing: I don't know what sorts of
shocking scandals Wikileaks planned to reveal by publishing these cables, but it appears that they have forgotten to reveal them. If they had any serious evidence of US wrongdoing, they would have released it on the first day - it would be illogical to imagine they'd wait any longer. But by now, I strongly suspect that they have nothing of consequence. The only revelation that has actually surprised me so far is that the government of Yemen offered the US the opportunity to conduct anti-al-Qaeda missile strikes on its territory and then covered up for the US afterwards. And that appears to have been instigated by Yemen itself. Other than that, all we've gotten is a handful of catty comments about foreign leaders and a bunch of supposed "insights" that any schmo who reads
The Economist can tell you: that Putin is the one who really holds power in Russia, that Britain is oddly paranoid over its relations with the US, that Sarkozy is impulsive and undiplomatic, that Berlusconi is an embarrassment to his country.
Who would have thought??? 
So they accomplished nothing to their credit, as far as I'm concerned.
What Wikileaks
has done is seriously harmed a lot of small-scale information-exchange relationships that the State Department has spent years building up. Each of these cables was written based on conversations with tons of government officials, civil society members, and academics, all of whom shared information with the understanding that no one but the US State Department would hear it, and now their words (thankfully with most of their names redacted) are spread across the Internet for everyone to see. Would you be willing to keep acting as a source after that? Losing these information channels will make it a lot harder in the short term for the US to formulate a fully informed foreign policy. Is there any logic in the US not having a fully informed foreign policy? Is there anything admirable about Wikileaks having created this situation?
Two more things: Number one, these diplomatic cables are not even official US policy. They are exactly what the name says: cables written by low-level diplomats about things they have observed in the country, that are then sent back to the State Department to be taken into consideration. So when you read these cables in which the United States of America is purported to have said
awful things about Nicolas Sarkozy,
how scandalous!, the only thing you have really found out is that some random US Foreign Service Officer in the Paris Embassy doesn't like the president of France too much. Nothing more. And number two, all declassified diplomatic cables are already published by the US government - usually after 25 years, long after their release could do any harm. The only thing Wikileaks has accomplished is to speed up the process to the point where it actually
will cause some harm. Way to go!
SO BASICALLY, my opinion on Wikileaks is that they're too full of themselves and blinded by their own messiah complex to realize that they've accomplished nothing. And, given that they've accomplished nothing, I judge their actions based on the harm they've done.
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