In a piece by Tunku Vardarajan on the Daily Beast, Yale’s own Charles Hill, the resident diplomat who teaches Yale’s renowned course in grand strategy, publicly bemoaned WikiLeaks’ publication of a quarter million state department cables.

Hill called the leak “something of a disaster for U.S. diplomacy,” Vardarajan writes. Hill continued:

Not because of what’s revealed — everyone knows all diplomatic services do and say such things — but because it has been revealed in a way that indicates the U.S. has lost its ability or willingness to keep such material closely held. So foreigners will tell us less and we will write less down and less substance will be conveyed to Washington. An earlier phase of this came in the late 1980s when it became clear — I was involved — that notes of internal Washington meetings could not be protected from release. So people stopped keeping notes. The result has been that the official record has withered, as has history’s knowledge of what happened. Now that loss is extended to foreign meetings.