LONDON: The US government has lost much diplomatic clout as the quagmire in Iraq has undermined its international prestige and distracted it from other problems, an influential think-tank said on Wednesday.

“There is an abiding sense... that the authority, prestige, reputation of the United States is not what it might have been four or five years ago,” said John Chipman, who heads the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Commenting on the IISS annual report of world affairs, Chipman told reporters that states and groups now “see themselves as less dependent” on US diplomatic initiatives to tackle their regional concerns.

For example, he said the US government found it harder to marshal its traditional “honest broker role” in the Middle East where there is so much concern about the impact of its actions in Iraq and the region.

He added that the United States was also so consumed with trying to resolve the problems in Iraq that it had less “diplomatic time” to spend on issues in regions like South America.

The IISS’s Alex Nicoll said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “completely failed to gain traction” when her government belatedly tried to revive diplomatic efforts to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

He said US President George Bush has also lost credibility in the battle against climate change after having initially failed to accept the need for action only to make concessions just before the G8 summit in Germany this year.—AFP