tache d’huile
n.— «Gallieni called this carefully coordinated military and social strategy the tache d’huile, the oil spot. Start out and carefully secure a hundred such bases and you are on your way to conquering a country.» —by Frederick Quinn French Overseas Empire May 30, 2000. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How and why do words from one language find their way into another? Vietnamese, for instance, includes lots of words borrowed or adapted from French. Such linguistic mixing often happens when languages brush up against each other and speakers reach...
How and why do words from one language find their way into another? Vietnamese, for instance, includes many words borrowed or adapted from French, a vestige of colonialism. For example, the Vietnamese word for “train station,” ga, comes...