The Games Leaders Play : France's high-toned opposition to a war in Iraq is more than just principle. It's also a careful calculation of national power.

A curious little manifesto called "The Cry of the Gargoyle" appeared last year in French bookshops. Its author, Dominique de Villepin, had for seven years kept a low profile in public life but loomed large in the Elysee Palace: the adviser, confidant, kindred spirit and chief of staff to President Jacques Chirac. Now he was to become the foreign minister, and his pamphlet would set the tone for the newly re-elected government. Exhortative and mystical, much of it sounds like the Biblical Book of Lamentations. "Today orphaned, uncertain, easily disenchanted, France still burns with a desire for history," he wrote. The time had come "to block this funeral march" and "leap forward."

Today, there's no doubt as to what Villepin, 49, is trying to block--the Bush administration's march on Iraq. As for his leap: with Chirac, he seeks to vault France back onto the global geopolitical stage. Standing up against America, Chirac has looked like the leader, if not of all Europe, then of all Europeans opposed to war. For that reason, it's not likely that he can, or will, back down, even if presented with an opportunity. Chirac thinks he's on a roll, even tapping into Africa's leadership at a summit in Paris last week to bill himself as Mr. Anti-Hegemon.

Whatever the sincerity of their reservations about this war, Chirac and Villepin, like 19th-century swordsmen, have been spoiling for a fight with Washington. France should be an "ardent defender of her rank," Villepin writes in "Gargoyle." Such sentiments are only fueled by the likes of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who turned what might have been a courtly, largely symbolic duel into a grudge match. His talk about France and Germany as "the Old Europe" played on all the phobias and resentments that Chirac and Villepin harbor about being has-been leaders of has-been countries in the face of American ...