When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially reacted to the WikiLeaks crisis, she at least acknowledged it was a major attack. Since that time, however, the United States has backpedaled away from any talk of aggression or retaliation in response to the blatant act of espionage.

The day after Clinton made her remarks, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates downplayed the significance of the unauthorized release of more than 250,000 classified State Department documents. He said the overall impact of America’s secrets going public would be “fairly modest.” Gates explained, “The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. … We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation” (emphasis mine throughout).

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs exuded this same air of superiority during an interview on December 1. We’re not afraid of one guy with a laptop, Gibbs exclaimed. “We’re the United States of America!”

This inflated sense of self-worth, however, does little in the way of fixing the massive amount of damage the leaks have already caused.

In addition to being a monumental embarrassment, as Charles Krauthammer noted last week, the security breach has caused specific damage to America’s war-fighting abilities. Krauthammer cited the now blown cover of Yemen’s president, who allowed the U.S. to bomb al Qaeda targets in his country while pretending to be responsible for the strikes himself. Given the unpopularity of his government in Yemen, the WikiLeaks revelation will now make it that much harder for the U.S. to penetrate what is fast becoming a terrorist stronghold.

America’s tenuous alliance with Pakistan is another grave concern. U.S. critics in Islamabad, of which there are many, cannot be happy about the cable accusing Pakistan of “playing a double game.” Other leaks reveal America’s aggravation over the lax security surrounding Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. As one Pakistani official recently noted, “The documents show what Washington really thinks about us.”

Think of the damage done to America’s information-gathering abilities. One secret cable, the Economist explained, contained important testimony from a well-connected Iranian businessman who works in Baku, was educated in Britain and made famous in Iran as a sportsman. His name was omitted from the cable, but how long will it be before Iranian authorities figure out who it is?

Next time he’s interviewed by American diplomats—assuming he will even be available—how forthright do you suppose he will be?

“We do know … that our adversaries are out there actively mining this information,” a Pentagon spokesman said earlier this week. We know they are using it, he went on to explain, “but how exactly they are changing their tactics is hard to quantify.”

According to Agence France-Presse, one secret cable contains a list of important global infrastructure locations, including underwater pipelines, communication ports and mineral reserves. Said P.J. Crowley, spokesman at the State Department, it’s exactly the kind of classified information that can be used by terrorist groups as a target list.

Besides aiding and abetting the terrorist cause, consider the impact WikiLeaks will have on America’s diplomatic exchanges with allies. There have already been reports, according to the Associated Press, of foreign diplomats backing away from their dealings with American officials. According to the State Department, fewer diplomats are now attending meetings abroad. In one particular case, there was a request for notebooks to be left outside the meeting room.

Who can blame them? No one wants their off-the-record comments to go viral. Even America’s own diplomats must surely be thinking twice about offering candid remarks when reporting back to Washington. How can they be expected to provide the unvarnished truth if, in the backs of their minds, they are worried about someone else seeing that information later?

All in all, as former cia officer Robert Baer wrote in the Financial Times, American credibility and diplomacy has suffered “incalculable” damage. “[T]he credibility of the State Department as a reliable interlocutor has evaporated, and no doubt for a long time,” Baer concluded. And the most disturbing development in all of this, as Krauthammer noted, “is the helplessness of a superpower that not only cannot protect its own secrets but shows the world that if you violate its secrets—massively, wantonly and maliciously—there are no consequences.”

Last week, a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell why the United States didn’t employ its recently developed Cyber Command in order to prevent the WikiLeaks fiasco. This was his stunning response: “We … clearly have offensive capabilities. But at the end of the day … the decision was made not to proceed with any sort of aggressive action of that sort in this case. It was just deemed not appropriate for us to consider such a thing.”

The Pentagon, in other words, could have possibly stopped WikiLeaks before it even got started. But that wouldn’t have been appropriate. And besides, as Morrell went on to explain, at the end of the day, the document dump “does not … adversely impact America’s power or prestige.”

Don’t worry—we’re the United States of America! We’re indispensable!

The rest of the world, meanwhile, sees America as a former superpower whose strength and prestige is in rapid decline. The pride of America’s power has already been broken, just as God said it would be (Leviticus 26:19). And nothing illustrates this quite like America’s passive response to the WikiLeaks sabotage—a blatant act of international espionage aimed directly at the United States.

It started five months ago with the illegal distribution of 77,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan. Then, in October, WikiLeaks released a second wave of nearly 400,000 secret documents, most of them coming from the battleground of Iraq. Now, the United States is trying to contain the widespread damage caused by the release of more than a quarter million U.S. Embassy cables.

Through it all, evidently, the United States of America could have stopped the cyberattacks, but chose not to.

It’s a far cry from the iron-handed approach to foreign affairs that presidents like Theodore Roosevelt once employed, when America was on the rise as a prestigious and dominant world power. “Speak softly and carry a big stick—[and] you will go far,” Roosevelt said. As Thomas Bailey wrote in his 1968 volume, The Art of Diplomacy, Roosevelt’s proverb means that for diplomatic courtesy to produce tangible results, it has to be backed by a show of real strength.

The strong can afford to be polite, Bailey explained, whereas the weak have to bluster.