st be less of a US domain) and US-led international embargoes (which France insisted it had every right to break without endangering international solidarity). Paris led Western dissent from US plans to attack Iraq at the beginning of 1998. Britain's Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, called it the odd man out in Europe on the issue, but the President's standing jumped in the opinion polls. At the same time, not content with having a French civil servant reorganising Asian economies at the head of the International Monetary Fund, it engaged in simultaneous lobbying to get its men installed as head of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and, even more important, to run the European Central Bank. Asked if this wasn't a bit rich, the Finance Minister responded that he was the kind of man who liked to have a cheese course as well as dessert. Coherence, or rather lack of it, is not a problem. The first President of the left caused concern in Washington by taking Communists into his government, but then gave determined backing to American missile policy in Europe. His successor from the right cancelled summit meetings with some of France's closest partners for alleged lack of solidarity with Paris, but then announced a major reorganisation of the armed forces which affected its allies without prior consultation. And, all the time, linguistically and philosophically the French obfuscate behind a thicket of subjunctives and conditional tenses. They can be `masters of splendid ambiguity' as Britain's former Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, noted. Margaret Thatcher wrote in evident exasperation of a President `speaking in paragraphs of perfectly crafted prose which seemed to brook no interruption', while US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recalled the inscrutable comment of a French diplomat about the interaction of the various European organisations: `It will work in practice, yes. But will it work in theory?' `The Fr...
