Chirac's Great Game.(Jacques Chirac)

Late in life, Francois Mitterrand let slip the news of a secret war. "France does not know it yet, but we are at war with America," reports his biographer, Georges-Marc Benamou. "A permanent war... a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans--they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world."

France's current president, Jacques Chirac, likens himself more to Charles de Gaulle than to Mitterrand. But never mind. The message is the same. America and France are at war--and it's no secret anymore. With the conflict winding down in Iraq, both sides are assessing the fallout from their diplomatic battles. The French--85 percent of whom opposed the war--are beginning to realize the consequences of dissent. "If Jacques Chirac persists in making the U.N. his next battlefield... he'll be dignified, glorious, solitary, and maybe even moving," opined the weekly L'Express. But the magazine also noted that he would be "without relevance."

As for Washington? Chirac may claim that his threatened Security Council veto in the run-up to war was a matter of principle. But the White House took it personally. If administration hawks get their way, France will pay. Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly said in Moscow last week. George Bush himself is said to deeply mistrust Chirac. U.S. officials fully expect the French to obstruct the next round of Iraq diplomacy at the United Nations. "What is their strategy?" asks one sarcastically. "Are they going to refuse to recognize the new Iraqi government? Are they going to recognize the government of Saddam Hussein?" The last thing anyone wants to see is Iraq's future bogged down in Paris.

So where does Chirac go from here? Finding the method in the French president's foreign policy has always been tricky. Chirac's style is a mercurial mix of passion and pragmatism, opportunism and principle, parochialism and internationalism. For the moment, comparisons to King Lear, stripped of his power but raging against the storm, seem apt. But Chirac may not be a powerless outcast for long. Viewed from Washington and London, his U.N. gamble was a terrible misjudgment. But in France, the man who only a year ago was widely perceived as a sleazy politico, under investigation on a slew of corruption charges, today enjoys an approval rating of 70 percent--on a par with Bush in the United States. "For the first time, it's no longer 'Chirac the Fixer' but 'Chirac the Hero'," says Anand Menon, director of the University of Birmingham's European Research Institute. Some Europeans have even bruited him for a Nobel.

Even as he savors his newfound glory, Chirac last week offered a transatlantic olive branch. As a gesture of good faith, he dropped France's objections to NATO's taking over peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan and announced a European Union airlift of injured Iraqi children. He also made a 20-minute phone call to President Bush, indicating that he was prepared to be "pragmatic" about his insistence that the United Nations play a "central role" in Iraq's future. Explains one French diplomat: "We want to be useful, and we're not useful off in a corner."

Trouble is, Chirac is stuck in several corners, not just one. Indeed, his biggest problem is not relations with Washington but within the European Union, badly divided during the prewar hostilities. Next week's mini summit on European defense--bringing together the antiwar camp of the French, ...