Most of the skilled diplomats I've met over the years have told me they live with the constant frustration that their best and most carefully produced thoughts end up being read by only a handful of people in power.

At least U.S. diplomats have now escaped that fate, courtesy of WikiLeaks.

Talk about writer's envy. The flood of U.S. diplomatic cables has given top embassy officials a worldwide audience that journalists and other commentators can only dream of.

For those caught up in this net, it no doubt seems like a nightmare. But at least their writings are the year's publishing sensation.

What's more, in a positive twist on an otherwise damaging story for U.S. diplomacy, these dispatches are getting rave reviews for style, brevity, clarity and objective reporting.

Anne Patterson, the then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, with special U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, in Islamabad in February 2010. A Bush appointee, Patterson left the post in October 2010, before WikiLeaks. (B.K.Bangash/Associated Press)

The impact is such that the notoriously wordy Indian foreign ministry has reportedly insisted its trainee diplomats study the leaked cables to "get a hang of the brevity with which thoughts and facts have been expressed."

Canadian diplomats are also impressed, several insisting that these newly published authors are providing unvarnished, objective assessments from abroad that are of particularly high quality.

One of the most prominent of Canada's former diplomats, Colin Robertson, told Canadian Press that he has been enthralled by this recent outpouring.

"We've always prided ourselves in the foreign service that, in order to succeed, you had to be a talented stylist as well," he said. "Writing a great cable is a bit of a lost art, and it's great to see the Americans restoring it."

Unusually blunt

What is also striking about these leaked cables is the insightful and remarkably blunt assessments that American officials have sent along to their State Department, particularly given the general tendency in American politics these days to dodge around so many crucial problems.

We haven't yet seen any evidence of deep criminal plots or conspiracies. But there has been much speaking truth to power, in ways that leaders need to hear.

Thus cables from Kabul describe Hamid Karzai's government as almost irredeemably corrupt, inefficient and even bizarre.

At the same time, the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, dismissed any White House hopes that the Pakistan government might be weaned away from its secret support of the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

"There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups," she wrote.

"Pakistan knows the U.S. cannot afford to walk away; the U.S. knows Pakistan cannot survive without it," referring to the U.S.

Rethinking the stereotypes

Far from downplaying the awfulness of many host governments, American diplomats alert Washington constantly to the flaws in friends and foes alike.

On human rights, some cables seem to nag Washington to be bolder. Thus Margaret Scobey, the U.S. ambassador in Cairo, addresses Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before her meeting with Egypt's foreign minister.

Margaret Scobey, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, attends an Easter midnight mass at the main Coptic Cathedral of Saint Marcos in Cairo on April 3, 2010 alongside Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. (Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters)

"He may not raise human rights, political reform or democratization, but you should," Scobey wrote. No diplomatic equivocation there.

Of course, these leaked cables have no doubt caused U.S. diplomacy considerable damage, particularly when it comes to trust.

But at the same time they are provoking many of the usual critics to rethink the common stereotype of U.S. diplomats as cocktail party gadflies and timid ciphers for Washington.

One of the most celebrated political writers on Europe today, the historian Timothy Garton Ash, recently admitted that he is pleasantly surprised by how astute the American cables from Moscow and European capitals have been.

"In fact, my personal opinion of the State Department has gone up several notches," Ash wrote recently.

He had thought the American foreign service to be generally weak in recent years. "But what we find here is often first rate."

No kowtowing thanks

Similarly, Neal Ascherson, an often acerbic critic of U.S. foreign policy, writes in The Guardian that he finds these cable writers "wise, courageous, patient, likable men and women" who appear to be helping guide America through the shoals of Great Power decline.

He sees two emerging patterns. "One, rooted in American history, is that the independence of new nations must be honoured and protected. The other is the struggle against nuclear proliferation.

"Preventing apocalypse has become more important than striving for world leadership," Ascherson says. "This is diplomacy clearer about what it doesn't want than what it does."

There is, indeed, a striking undertone throughout the cables of a world that the U.S no longer dominates, but that it also cannot retreat from.

Its diplomats are looking for leverage, but they know that it is increasingly unclear — since the Iraq War, the economic crisis and the increasing signs of dysfunction in Washington — just what cards a fretful superpower can play. Seeking the least-bad option seems the new norm.

Despite this new reality, though, the often slyly sarcastic views in some of these cables offers more than just humourous relief.

Special relationships? Former British prime minister Tony Blair receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the U.S., from George W. Bush in January 2009. (Jason Reed/Reuters)

One British writer, for example, was glad to see Canada labeled openly as having "an inferiority complex," while some Canadian diplomats were tickled to see the cables paint a wickedly accurate portrait of Britain's obsessive, almost trembling deference to Washington (most marked during the Tony Blair period).

In recent years, as the cables reveal, U.S. diplomats have sometimes been embarrassed by the degree to which both Labour and Conservative politicians in the U.K. have cringed before their American counterparts in attempts to bolster the so-called special relationship between the two countries.

The British attitude "would often be humourous were it not so corrosive," sniffed the U.S. deputy chief of mission in London, Richard LeBaron.

This cable alone is a useful reminder that in international affairs the reward for kowtowing is usually contempt from those being bowed to.

We are nowhere near the point where the full impact of these leaks can be assessed, nor do we know what dire secrets may yet come out.

But it is at least some comfort that U.S. leaders are being offered frank views on the world from seemingly intelligent people in the field.

One hopes that other countries are similarly served by their own set of skilled diplomats and, also, that uncomfortable opinions will actually be carefully considered.