Not so long ago Germany seemed the supplicant because of its reliance on Russian oil and gas.

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The United States is hardly the supplicant Britain was in the 1940s.

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The IKRC has been sanctioned by the Treasury Department for its connections to Hezbollah, a long time supplicant of the Iranian regime.

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That China is not a U.S. supplicant may rub some opinion leaders the wrong way, but that is not a persuasive argument for a more provocative posture.

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The stronger aspirants, Poland and the Czech Republic, have distanced themselves from calls by troubled Hungary (like Latvia, an IMF supplicant) to shorten the qualifying period in ERM-2 from two years.

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Belatedly, Mr Blair seems to acknowledge that he should be seen to make a principled stand over the treatment of these men, but he sounds too much like a timid supplicant.

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Predictably agreement on the detail is now bogged down in spats, which can generally be characterised as supplicant, struggling southern nations wanting easier terms for potential rescues than the rich north would prefer.

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The body language was not supplicant.

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Remember the Chinese fable of the mighty emperor who agreed to give a wily supplicant one grain of rice for the first square on a chess board, double that for the second square, double again for the third and so on, before he realised that he would be giving away his whole kingdom's supply before the board was half-finished.

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