National prestige is diplomatic capital; the more unpopular America becomes, the higher the price of foreign support. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN’s deputy secretary-general, recently said that suspicion of the United States has grown to the point where “many otherwise quite moderate countries” are inclined to oppose anything we favor.
– Jonathan Rauch in “Unwinding Bush: How long will it take to fix his mistakes?” in The Atlantic, October 2006