And further extensions provide Iran with additional bargaining chips and concrete achievements while America's leverage diminishes.
I urge them and I hope you will urge them, as the outgoing presidency but part of the Troika of the European Union, to exercise their considerable diplomatic and political leverage to diminish both tension and the desperately dangerous arms race which has now gathered pace in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Some executives speculated at the World Series that with contraction looming, second-tier free agents like Tino Martinez and Chan Ho Park may try to move fast to make their best deals, so that their negotiating leverage is not diminished.
"Obama has clearly made a premeditated move away from the unilateralism of the Bush years, and he's done it because it's the right way to conduct foreign policy, but has also done it because America's leverage has been diminished," said David J. Rothkopf, a Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration and the author of "Running the World," a book about the National Security Council.
In effect, they say, Mr. Kerry is insisting that the Syrian opposition sit down with representatives of a Syrian president who appears as determined as ever to hang on to power and at a time when the opposition's leverage has been diminished.
Their leverage would surely be diminished.
Instead, critics like Dr. Horton said, Mr. Bloomberg has started carrying out all the 4,500 layoffs he was threatening, and further diminished his leverage by announcing that he had withdrawn a "doomsday" threat of 10,500 layoffs.
But the arrival of Mr. Ovitz on the management scene -- as well as the success of top management companies like Basic Entertainment (formerly Brillstein-Grey), which produces HBO's "The Sopranos" -- left agents worried that they were locked in by legalities that diminished their leverage and hurt them financially.
But as the Arab awakening unfolds, Washington's leverage will further diminish unless its rhetoric catches up with its actions.
Mr. Pataki, in an interview with reporters, did not address how the two seats might be selected, but he did lament New York's diminishing leverage in Washington.
