After a recent Security Council resolution on Lebanon, John Bolton, the iconoclastic US ambassador to the United Nations, invoked the wisdom of the Rolling Stones to assembled reporters.
"You can't always get what you want," he intoned, "but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need."
It was an interesting statement from the ambassador of a country more often characterised in UN circles as coming late to negotiations and rejecting them if it does not get exactly what it wants.
Senator Paul Sarbanes upbraided this tendency in the Senate foreign relations committee last week. "I'd hate for you to be the coach of an athletic team," he told Mr Bolton. "This role of the constant scold, I'm not sure it's the best way to induce change."
Yet the recent US record at the UN is more complex than that put-down would suggest. For a start, in spite of personal rivalries, significant progress has been made in relations between the transatlantic powers, which appear once more broadly in harmony during UN debates.
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