The WikiLeaks Files: the world according to US empire. Yet the official US reaction to "cable-gate" was frenetic. Popular anxiety about terrorism had been fanned to a fever after the 9/11 attacks, and national security officials seized on the leakage of cables to warn Americans about even more threats. In 2012 the US government imposed a "WikiLeaks fatwa" which absurdly instructed all officials to find and permanently delete any classified documents published on the internet or in the media if WikiLeaks had disclosed them. In the land of the free, students at Columbia University were warned that if they made social media comments on these documents or posted links to them, they could fail to get security clearances for jobs in government. Internet access to WikiLeaks was blocked by national libraries; major international studies journals rejected all manuscripts citing WikiLeaks material; and the Pentagon stopped all emails containing the organisation's name. In response, WikiLeaks has set up a Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), containing the cables and other diplomatic records, and a chapter in this book by Sarah Harrison explains how to use it.

Even now, few people have read all the cables on the WikiLeaks website. So this book performs a post-leak service, acting as a ready reference to individual topics, with commentaries updating developments on many of them to 2015. It divides them geographically, and specialist writers deal with regions and individual countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, enabling readers to select what interests them. There is no chapter, unfortunately, on Australia, which fails to appear in the index. The whole weighty book is a missile aimed at breaking the plate glass of US diplomacy and revealing its motivations. It calculates what Julian Assange in his introduction calls the "true human cost of empire" – even though the US, founded on the rejection of imperialism and the pursuit of liberty, persistently denies that it has an empire. In fact, as Chalmers Johnson, Oliver Stone and other American historians have shown, a gap has always yawned between what the US believes or says and what it does. For more than a century, while talking up its aspirations for global freedom and human rights, the US has favoured stability over reform and profits over people, repeatedly deposing democratically elected populist leaders and supporting dictators in many countries. These chapters reveal how the terms that present the US favourably – democracy promotion, free trade, the rule of law – are constantly used, while their real meaning is the opposite. The American empire, as it pursues economic and military power and administrative and diplomatic control in many countries ahead of the well-being of their citizens, is no different from its predecessors. But Assange argues that the US above all wants an empire of markets which it dominates. Although Nazi and Soviet propaganda once set the standard, the US has been an adept pupil, not least by relabelling its own propaganda as "public diplomacy" and "smart power". Such Orwellian manipulation of language is used everywhere in this book, even between US diplomats themselves. They devote particularly skilled attention to torture which, as George W. Bush declared, the US "does not do". "Enhanced interrogation techniques" against "enemy combatants" or "political prisoners" are euphemisms that soothe the conscience.

The cables reveal that Iraqi forces were trained to use torture techniques which the US justified as a response to "terrorism". Yet WikiLeaks itself, according to Sarah Palin, Republican Congressman Peter King and Fox News in 2010, should be listed as a "'terrorist organisation" and not the United States. Like torture, terrorism, this book comments, "is always something the enemy does". The US repeatedly "exempts itself [and Israel] from standards it purports to impose on the rest of the world", American journalist Glenn Greenwald has observed. Thus Hillary Clinton heaped praise on the internet for the media freedom that enabled the Arab Spring, but two years later the US backed a military coup against Egypt's elected Muslim Brotherhood, resulting in bloody massacres and reinstating a military dictatorship which now imprisons journalists. The cables show that in Yemen, General David Petraeus, purporting to be bombing al-Qaeda targets, was actually helping Yemen's authoritarian ruler in 2010 to attack his local opponents, who were described as "terrorists". When US drone strikes, claimed to be against "militants", intensified in 2011, turning 40,000 into refugees, the identity of the real terrorists was scarcely in doubt. Since then, US ally Saudi Arabia had become the proxy bomber. In Syria, the cables show, changing the "illegitimate" Assad regime by fomenting sectarian civil war had been a US aim from at least 2006, even though President Obama assured the public in 2013 that the goal of US military action was not to overthrow the government nor to promote sectarian conflict. Iran was long represented as a potential nuclear threat, including by US missile weapons corporations seeking to promote arms sales to NATO and Persian Gulf states. Yet Defense Secretary Gates admitted in a cable that the US did not have "concrete proof of the threat from Iran", and American cables from the UN reveal the pressure the US was applying to Iran to admit that it had a nuclear weapons program.

In many Latin American states, as this book confirms, American-assisted coups and counter-coups were justified for decades by identifying populist leaders as the enemy, either communist or terrorist, and displacing them with dictators who would advance the interests of US corporations. The cables also reveal how the US increasingly uses proxies to fight its enemies and to undermine elected governments which it publicly recognises. But with the US distracted by the "war on terror" in the Middle East, several Latin American countries elected socialist reformers who defied US-backed coup attempts. They funded their programs by making concessional oil deals with Venezuela's energy company PETROSUR, and were supported by the regional media conglomerate TeleSUR, both attracting US hostility. Venezuela's PetroCaribe provides subsidised oil and gas to developing Caribbean nations, and hence is seen as a threat to US interests. There is much more in the cables, including on China, Japan, Indonesia, Russia and Europe. But the mechanisms of US global empire are consistent. What remains unclear is why Assange, having edited the book and written the introduction, has allowed the author of the first three chapters to remain anonymous. The style and content appear to be his. Dr Alison Broinowski is a research affiliate at ANU. She stood for the WikiLeaks Party for the Senate in 2013.