But what about our diplomatic mission in Canada? What untold secrets do their classified communications reveal to the world? Now that those cables have been released, we finally know: Canada is a pretty dull place to be a U.S. diplomat.

How will this week's release of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.org impact U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, Pakistan, and elsewhere? Six CFR experts are unanimous in cautioning that WikiLeaks' latest data dump could hurt sensitive relationships and make open exchanges more difficult.

The online release of a quarter of a million classified U.S. diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks organization has stirred up a world of controversy. Days after the release, with world leaders and U.S. government officials scrambling to exercise damage control, journalists and experts continue to pick over the revelations for the most revealing tidbits about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

WikiLeaks' slowly spilling flood of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables has sparked a fierce debate around the world about not only the ethics of this leak, but its very value. My first training is not as a journalist, but as an historian and a philosopher, which means I've got a fancy way to describe this situation: an epistemological quandary, i.e., we don't know what we should know.

In order to determine whether Sesame Street is a form of public diplomacy, we must first establish which lens to view public diplomacy through.If public diplomacy is citizens—or in this case Muppets—acting on behalf of a political body to establish interpersonal connections, then no, Sesame Street is not a vehicle for public diplomacy. However, if public diplomacy is measured by outcome, and not intention, then I dare say that Elmo and friends are cultural ambassadors.

Larry Schweikart, co-producer of the film "Rockin’ the Wall": "Rock music was blasted to through the Iron Curtain through government-subsidized Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and we interviewed the legal counsel for VOA who described the debates inside the Reagan administration about the appropriateness of sending 'degenerate' rock music eastward. But even the advisory boards came to understand that it was the structure of rock, as much as the lyrics, that counted.

I have to admit, I'm kind of in awe of all the recent WikiLeaks chaos. One of the most engrossing aspects of the subject is how 5 of the world's largest newspapers were simply ordinary (albeit B-list) shills in the process of information dissemination - in other words, it was a website that actually broke the story. The big papers simply republished what was already out there on the world wide web. Really makes you notice how the traditional media is now so easily left in the dust vis-à-vis the web - and therefore, unfortunately, as irrelevant as we've ever witnessed.

Diplomacy is the second oldest legal profession but arguably the least understood. This reality has triggered disparate assessments of the impact of WikiLeaks’ release of thousands of U.S. confidential diplomatic dispatches. The consequences for the conduct of diplomacy are far-reaching and go beyond U.S. fundamental values of freedom of speech and transparency.