France's opposition to the Iraq war in 2003 was greeted with surprise and outrage by Anglo-American politicans. But as David Styan argues in his penetrating new book, Chirac's stance was consistent with a decades-long reorientation of French foreign policy. Styan dissects the processes by which a country, notorious for its suppression of Algerian independence, came to cast itself as the anti-imperialist champion of the Arab world.