President Bush rings President Hu Jintao to chew the fat over the yuan, Taiwan and North Korea. I've always wondered about these phone calls - I imagine they are stiffly formal affairs, completely pre-arranged where both read a script on a conference call with 200 people listening in. Completely useless, in other words. But the timing cannot be co-incidental. This week President Chirac of France is in Asia, partly to push the EU to lift its arms embargo on China. Again it isn't a co-incidence that France has Europe's biggest arms industry. The Americans are firmly against lifting the arms embargo, fearing (correctly) it will upset the strategic balance between Taiwan and China and hurt efforts to improve human rights. The flow-on is if the EU lifts its arms embargo, the USA could withhold defense co-operation with the Europeans. While that could well suit the French, the more Atlantist members of the EU, such as the UK and Poland, will no doubt veto the lifting of the arms embargo.

So the end result is France looks good in the eyes of China while it knows that even if it loses in attempting to overturn the embargo, it wins in other favourable concessions from China. Say what you like about Chirac, he's a canny politician and diplomat.