But that IS their History

André Glucksmann points out how action can speak for themselves:

The protagonists of this shady entanglement include not only heads of the military industrial complex (like Gergorin, who worked at Lagardere, EADS, Airbus and Ariane), top figures at the foreign ministry (Villepin) and secret service spies (General Rondot), they also include members of the government's geopolitical think-tank CAP, which works out diplomatic and strategic initiatives of the Elysee, for example France's "Arab" and "African" policies, and its support for Milosevic and Saddam Hussein in their heydays. This heterogeneous black cabinet which prefers to avoid publications and media attention, quietly gathers together post-communist intellectuals and post-Gaullist elite-bureaucrats under the banner of a respectable anti-Americanism, open to both left-wing anti-imperialists and right-wing sovereigntists: Regis Debray and Emmanuel Todd are esteemed advisers.

This endearing family presides - without either undue modesty or parliamentary control - over the worldly destinies of France. A country with a mere hundredth of the world's inhabitants has worked its way up to be the planet's third-biggest arms dealer. Cock-a-doodle-doo! In a demonstration of "soft power" and universal moral sovereignty, Dominique de Villepin's famous speech at the UN in 2003 revealed to the four billion people of the world, in Jacques Chirac's words, that France was still France. The Paris-Moscow axis pursues its objectives to the detriment of Europe of the 25; arms and patents are delivered to China to the detriment of the Atlantic Alliance: all this raises our camarilla far above the classic, measured anti-Americanism from De Gaulle to Mitterrand which in times of danger (be it the Cuba Crisis or the question of the Russian SS20 missiles) always came home to the fold of Euro-American democracies. Today, all of that is history. Down with "hyper power"!