It is hard to imagine Saudi Arabia burying its oil industry in favor of strong climate change policy. Klaas Lingbeek-van Kranen/istock

We’ve only seen a tiny fraction of the infamous 251,287 secret U.S. government documents obtained by WikiLeaks, but already they have made two things clear: governments speak out of both sides of their mouth -- which is no great surprise -- and U.S. leverage in the real, nasty world out there is increasingly limited.

As innumerable commentators have noted, Saudi Arabia is a prime case in point. In public it would never dream of saying anything in support of military attacks on Iran; in private, King Abdullah urges the United States to "cut off the head of the snake." In public, it vows support in the fight against terrorism; in private it does little or nothing to stem the flow of funds to al-Qaeda, even knowing that Saudi private citizens are its biggest source of financial support.

But some much less commented-upon secret cables on the subject of climate change also richly illuminate both these lessons -- the duplicity and obstructiveness of a major ally, which have been on full display this week at the latest round of U.N. climate negotiations in Cancún, and the inability of the United States to do much about it. The most interesting of the cables is one from U.S. Ambassador James B. Smith, dated February 12, 2010 -- two months after the disputatious climate talks in Copenhagen, which were saved from total disaster by a limited accord brokered personally by President Obama (which the Saudis hated).

Let’s start with the title of Smith’s cable: TWO FACES OF SAUDI ARABIA’S CLIMATE NEGOTIATING POSITION. (You could quibble, I suppose, over the semantic distinction between saying that someone has two faces and calling them two-faced, but that would be a digression.) There are good guys and bad guys in Smith’s portrayal of the Saudi government, one private face and one public one, a situation that the ambassador refers to as "schizophrenic." The good guys include the petroleum minister, Ali Al-Naimi, who "has consistently been rational and practical in talking with western delegations about climate change," and the senior adviser to the President of Meteorology and Environment, Fawaz el-Alamy, who says that "the U.S. and Saudi Arabia share the same values on climate change."

The bad guys, meanwhile, are headed by Mohammad Al-Sabban, which is rather unfortunate, since he happens to be the Kingdom’s lead climate negotiator. The ambassador minces no words about Dr. Al-Sabban, who says that "the U.S. Administration’s rhetoric to end dependence on foreign oil, reiterated by President Obama in Copenhagen, is antagonistic and causes genuine fear in Saudi Arabia." And then there are "Al-Sabban’s public comments, such as questioning the science behind climate change just before Copenhagen, and his often obstructionist behavior… during working-level negotiations."

Ambassador Smith doesn’t quite know where the compass is going to settle. "Senior Ministry of Petroleum officials have reassured us after each of Al-Sabban’s public outbursts over the last six months that he has been 'tamed' and brought back onto the reservation," Smith writes. But can those assurances be trusted? The ambassador worries that, "The frequency and number of times that Al-Sabban steps out of line, and the apparent lack of any sanction, raises questions about the real Saudi position on climate change." It’s all very confusing.

Smith strikes a note of optimism, however. "There appears to be a growing sense within the SAG [Saudi Arabian Government] that it may be in danger of becoming isolated on climate change, which may prompt a re-examination of its position." And assistant minister of petroleum, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, has "intimated that Al-Sabban would not long retain his position."

Well, dream on. Four months after Smith’s cable, Al-Sabban was conducting business as usual at another round of talks, this time in Bonn, where Saudi Arabia and two other Gulf oil-producing states, Kuwait and Qatar, blocked a proposal to carry out a new study on the effects of a global increase in temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And this week Al-Sabban is representing Saudi Arabia at the much more significant Cancún conference, where environmental groups gave the Kingdom its Fossil of the Day Award on day three.

Saudi Arabia justifies its obstructionism by casting itself as a member of the G-77, the grouping of developing countries. It’s curious, to say the least, to think of the Kingdom in the same economic category as, say, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, and Cambodia, given that it is the world’s 23^rd largest economy, the largest oil exporter, and the owner of 20 percent of all known petroleum reserves, which accounts for its per capita GDP in 2009 of $23,300.

But that in a sense is the whole point, as Ambassador Smith tacitly acknowledges when he refers, with diplomatic understatement, to Saudi Arabia’s "concern about the impact a transition to a low-carbon energy mix will have on the country’s revenue stream." Even the friendlier Saudis, like Al-Alamy, say that the Kingdom has a "strong aversion to mixing trade and environmental priorities."

Which, sadly, might also be said of the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. Ambassador Smith’s first priority after his arrival was to help push through a $60 billion arms sale -- the biggest in history -- to equip the Saudi air force with a new generation of fighter jets and helicopters. And then, of course, there’s the small matter of the more than one million barrels a day of oil with which Saudi Arabia feeds our oil addiction. When push comes to shove among competing agendas, the Saudis would seem to have us, if you’ll excuse the obvious pun, over a barrel.