However, since altruism is rarely the basis on which nations formulate their foreign policy, analysts have been speculating why Paris is taking such an uncompromising line on Iraq. The easy explanation is that the French have long made a fine art of being splendidly contrary in their international politics. In the 1960s they pursued their own independent nuclear deterrent and as a result, refused to come under the NATO command umbrella. At the height of the Cold War, when Washington was trying to lead a united front against the Soviet Union, the French opened their own bilateral relations with Moscow.

Though their traditional rivals, the British, would like to characterize French behavior as willful, the French have the political savvy to play a long and farsighted game. Before Saddam invaded Kuwait, French commercial involvement with Iraq was extensive and profitable. This was widely assumed to be the motive behind the Chirac government’s prominence in calling for an easing of sanctions against Iraq. France wanted to be well placed to pick up contracts when a grateful Saddam regime returned to the international fold.

It is likely that Chirac is thinking several moves ahead, to the point where the Bush regime has flown in the face of all friendly advice and launched its military into Iraq. Give or take the odd chemical counterattack or heroic last-ditch stand by the Republican Guard, Saddam’s defeat will probably be a walkover. It is the post-invasion period that Paris may be thinking about. Americans are psychologically ill-equipped to be an army of occupation in an Arab world for which they have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding. Whatever good will they will bring to their attempts to organize a successor regime to Saddam will be destroyed immediately by their continued slavish support for Israel. Any US-installed government will be doomed by that association. By extension, British influence too will have been damaged by Washington’s failure. Then step forward the French government, at the head of European Union mediators, with the probable backing of Russia and perhaps China, to sort out the mess created by Washington and London and thus earn extensive regional gratitude and standing.

Indeed, French diplomacy at the moment approaches the immaculate. If Washington is dissuaded from its dangerous unilateral aggression against Iraq, it will be the French who will be seen to have successfully championed common sense and the legitimacy of the UN. Truly a win-win game for Chirac.

PARIS — Both French and British officials yesterday tried to play down the gravity of last week’s row between President Jacques Chirac and the Prime Minister Tony Blair but the once comfortable relationship between the two men has clearly ended.

The French government confirmed yesterday that the Anglo-French summit at Le Touquet in December has been postponed until the New Year. The French Foreign Office spokesman said: "Both sides needed a little more time to prepare this important event". One official described the delay in private as a "cooling-off period" but it is clear that the postponement was intended on Chirac’s side as a snub to Blair. French officials said that it would be "wrong to say that there was no connection" between the re-scheduling of the summit and the angry exchange between the two leaders at the Brussels summit on Friday.

The quarrel seems to have been largely a question of simmering personal resentments over a series of issues, ranging from Iraq to the EU budget, bursting finally out into the open. Officials in Paris, Brussels and London were at a loss to understand yesterday why such a routine European event as a Franco-British row over farm spending should have been the occasion for an unseemly, semi-public spat between two experienced politicians. "There is no particular problem between the British and French governments. We are getting on well over a series of issues. But there does seem to be a problem between our leaders," one official said.

President Chirac is said to have taken exception to Blair lecturing him during the EU summit on the proper meaning of a past agreement on European farm spending. He told Blair later that he had been "very rude" and that "no-one has ever spoken to me like that". In truth, much worse things have been said at EU summits. Chirac once described Margaret Thatcher as a "housewife" and complained — during a plenary session of a summit in Brussels in 1987 — that the then British prime minister wanted his "balls". Some commentators in Paris were inclined to blame Chirac for Friday’s spat. They said that the French president was at his worst during EU negotiations, becoming quickly rattled if he was unable to impose his own way. Chirac angered the Germans at a summit in 1999 and alienated virtually everyone except Blair with his peremptory style when chairing the Nice summit in 2001.

It seems that some bad feeling has also developed between Blair and Chirac over their different approaches to the Iraq crisis. Although, at official level, the two governments have cooperated well in the United Nations, Chirac is said to have been annoyed by Blair’s seeming willingness to echo in public the changing daily line from the Bush administration. The French president was apparently especially irritated last week when Blair said that Britain would be prepared to join the US in military action against Iraq, whether the UN approved or not. Chirac is said to have regarded this as an unhelpful remark at a time when French attempts to push through a UN compromise, acceptable to both the US and more dovish members of the Security Council, appeared to be gaining ground.

Last week’s row caps a long period of disenchantment with Chirac in the Blair camp. When the Socialist Lionel Jospin was the French prime minister, Downing Street tried to cultivate Chirac as a way of irritating Jospin, regarded as too "old Labour".

Blair’s team rapidly reached the conclusion that Chirac was an unreliable friend but personal relations between the president and the British prime minister have been relaxed until now. (The Independent)

HAS North Korea's Kim Jong-il aced President George W. Bush? The United States kept Pyongyang's confession of seeking a nuclear weapon through a uranium-producing programme under wraps for nearly a fortnight. And Washington has since then been scrambling to justify why it is treating a country which reportedly possesses a few nuclear bombs differently from its single-minded devotion to toppling President Saddam Hussein on the suspicion that he has weapons of mass destruction.

A cottage industry has developed in the US on divining why North Korea confessed to breaking the 1994 agreement and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The simple answer is that, from Pyongyang's point of view, the timing was perfect. The US was already facing an international storm over its planned unilateral action against Iraq and could not fight two wars at the same time. Judging by the American reaction, Pyongyang has been proved right. Indeed, the Korea stand-off has a history.

At the Demilitarised Zone at Panmunjom, South Korean and American soldiers wearing the UN hat guard the world's last Cold War frontier. Huts straddling the two sides serve as a rather rare meeting place for North Koreans and Americans in disguise. It was the foolishness of the Soviets to walk out of the UN Security Council which enabled the US to declare its war on the Korean peninsula in the 1950s as a UN war. The atmosphere at the DMZ can best be described as glacial. Technically, the two halves of Korea remain in a state of suspended war. South Korea's President Kim Dae-jung, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, assumed office promoting his 'sunshine' policy towards North Korea, in contrast to his predecessors' hard line. While South Korea progressed spectacularly in the economic field under a series of military dictatorships, its laws in dealing with the North were draconian, premised as they were on a deep suspicion of the communist state's intentions.

In 1994, Jimmy Carter, latest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, brokered a deal with North Korea's Kim Il-sung to end Pyongyang's nuclear plutonium-producing programme for two donated light-water nuclear reactors and 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil a year in the interim. But president Bill Clinton ran out of time in his last-minute effort to widen the détente; his successor, George W. Bush, taking a hardline approach.

Dae-jung's most remarkable achievement was an unprecedented summit with the North's Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang, but its promise remained unfulfilled because mutual suspicions, the North's secretive regime and American reservations clouded the sun. Dae-jung himself was beset with domestic problems, including scams involving his sons, and his worldwide reputation was unmatched by his political footwork at home. Politicians, many of them critics of his policy towards the North, demanded results and looked askance at Seoul's generosity to a starving and hard-up North.

To compound Dae-jung's problems, an early meeting he had with President George W. Bush in Washington was like monsoon rain on his 'sunshine' policy. The promised return visit of Jong-il to Seoul did not materialise and the final phase of Dae-jung's one-term presidency would, it seemed, mock the Nobel Prize he won for promoting peace on the peninsula. But the North, out of desperation or otherwise, showed new signs of flexibility and negotiations between the two halves resumed, and, belatedly, the foundation of the promised light-water reactors was only recently laid with some ceremony. The Bush administration, having reportedly completed its review, sent an official for talks in Pyongyang. He came back with the explosive confession of the North. But Japan, the other neighbour of North Korea, was not sitting idle. In a path-breaking diplomatic move, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made an official visit to Pyongyang in September to receive the startling confession that it had, in fact, abducted as many as 17 Japanese in 1978 for training its spies and that eight of them had died. Five came visiting to tearful reunions, without the spouses and children they had acquired in the meantime, with the Japanese authorities initially blocking their return to North Korea.

Bush has had to mix his single-issue Iraq theme with North Korea with the visiting Chinese President Jiang Zemin at his Texas ranch and in talks with the Japanese and South Korean leaders on the sidelines of the Asia and Pacific Cooperation summit in Mexico. In Texas, Bush had had to remain content with the Chinese vision of a nuclear weapon-free Korean Peninsula and in Mexico the two Asian allies did not agree to isolate North Korea until it gave up its nuclear endeavours.

These are portentous developments. They come in the wake of the official American policy of unilateralism and pre-emption and even as Russia and France have been trying to checkmate the US on Iraq in the UN Security Council, North Korea's neighbours are asserting their interests in the face of the American juggernaut. Japanese and South Korean interests are not identical, except on the central point of avoiding a new crisis on the Korean peninsula.

For Japan, the Koizumi visit was an assertion of independence in foreign policy. The kidnapping issue was a central one hampering the institution of diplomatic relations and initiation of a major economic aid programme. Heart-wrenching as the North Korean confessions have been in the snuffing out of Japanese lives by mutation, if not death, Pyongyang's confession on kidnappings has brought about a catharsis. Japan has been particularly alarmed by North Korea's missile programme. Establishing normal diplomatic relations with it would imply a greater ability to influence the North's moves and begin a more fruitful aid-giving relationship.

South Korea is divided between its deep attachment to the peninsula's reunification - family reunions, rare as they have been, are indications of the depth of feelings - and the sense of official foreboding over the costs of reunification. South Koreans have assiduously studied the German example and the astronomical and recurring costs Bonn has had to bear in incorporating the former German Democratic Republic.

There is the palpable fear in South Korea that Seoul would have to bear an even stiffer price if the North were to collapse.

The mantra of South Korea has, therefore, been to promote a 'soft landing' by giving generous assistance to the North and improving conditions there sufficiently to make an eventual reunion less painful. But America is the essential third player. It has 37,000 troops in South Korea and has declared that these troops would stay even after the peninsula's reunification, a proposition South Korea accepts.

In the disastrous first meeting between President Bush and Kim Dae-jung, the former had made it clear that he did not trust North Korea, and Pyongyang's new confession would have served merely to reinforce his suspicions. If the new openness of North Korea were to be sustained and yield results, most dramatically in connecting the two halves by air, road and rail, South Koreans would have something to cheer about.