Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator John Kerry and former State Department officials all stressed the need for US diplomats to have candid conversations with foreign interlocutors without fear of public exposure.

"Every country, including the United States, must be able to have honest, private dialogue with other countries about issues of common concern," Clinton told reporters.

But the chief US diplomat also said she was confident "the partnerships the Obama administration has worked so hard to build will withstand this challenge" posed by the dump of documents by the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.

James Collins, a former US ambassador to Moscow, was not so sure.

"It's certainly going to complicate the ability to build trust," Collins told AFP.

"It's hard to say yet whether it's going to undermine it or not. But it's certainly going to undermine the ability of people to have confidence that what they talk about in confidence will stay that way," he said.

Collins, who heads the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Russia and Eurasia program, said the leaks will put a chill on talks with foreign powers and deny Washington a source of information on which to build policy.

"It will also deprive them (foreign policy makers) of the ability to get candid advice from our people in the field," he added.

He said it will complicate the US ability to conduct multi-party negotiations on sensitive topics, such as efforts to curb the nuclear ambitions on Iran and North Korea or to stabilize Afghanistan.

"If you're conducting negotiations, are these going to be confidential or not?" Collins said. "Our partners are just not going to know."

On Iran, the United States works with Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. On North Korea, it works with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.

He said he could not tell whether the leaks would undercut the Obama administration's policy to "reset" relations with Russia which hit a low during the administration of former president George W. Bush.

Nor could he tell whether it will undermine understandings with partners on Iran.

Wendy Chamberlin, a former US ambassador to Pakistan, told AFP that a "great deal of damage" had been done to the conduct of diplomacy, adding that foreign interlocutors "will be constrained to talk to us if they know it will go immediately into the press and to their publics."

Richard Haas, a former director of policy planning at the State Department, said the massive leak "does not appear to constitute a national security crisis," but causes both immediate and long-term problems for the United States and its partners.

"The longer term damage may be more real," wrote Haas, the Council on Foreign Relations president.

"Foreign governments may think twice before sharing their secrets or even their candid judgments with American counterparts lest they read about them on the Internet," he said.

Haas said the WikiLeaks revelations may also create some immediate security problems.

"Counterterrorism efforts in Yemen might also be set back as the leadership there might well feel the need to distance itself from the United States," he said.

In January talks with US General David Petraeus, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh admitted lying to his own people by pretending that US military strikes against Al-Qaeda are carried out by Yemeni forces, according to a leaked document.

"If you look at something like Yemen, it may make them unwilling to cooperate with respect to terrorism," US Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters.

"It's an outrageous, counter-productive effort and I think that prosecution is what ought to happen," he said.

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