Theresa May last week set out her vision for Britain’s future trading relationship with the European Union. It was an overdue moment of clarity that may go some way toward unblocking stalled Brexit negotiations. But the U.K. Prime Minister has yet to provide any answer to a more fundamental question at the heart of Brexit: how does she see Britain’s future place in the world?

Brexiters insist that the decision to quit the EU was no act of isolationism or protectionism. They claim it was instead a vote for “global Britain” with “the freedom to make its own way in the world”. But what does global Britain mean in practice? And what will it do with this new-found freedom?

Of course, the U.K. is already a significant player on the global stage—and the British government wants it to stay that way. The U.K. is one of only two European countries with an independent nuclear deterrent and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council; it has one of Europe’s largest diplomatic networks; it is a leading NATO member; and it is the only major Western economy that spends both 2% of national output on defense and 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid.

Even so, doubts about the U.K.’s commitment to its global role were emerging even before the Brexit referendum. The U.K. has played little role in efforts to resolve the Ukraine crisis, leaving the task to France and Germany. It has also been a bystander in the Syrian crisis since 2013, when Parliament refused to back airstrikes against the Assad regime. The U.K.’s only major foreign-policy initiative in recent years was its ill-fated 2011 attack on Libya, a strategic disaster that left the country a failed state, allowing it to become a major transit route for migrants entering the EU.

Recent British inaction has been matched by a reluctance to invest. The Foreign Office budget has been slashed by half since 2010, with many embassies closed or downsized. The British army already has fewer than 78,000 full-time soldiers, the lowest in modern peacetime history. The Royal Navy surface fleet comprises just 19 ships, compared with 50 in 1990, none of which at one point in December were deployed outside British waters; the first of two new aircraft carriers won’t deploy until 2020 and even then won’t carry a full complement of aircraft until the mid-2020s. Now further military cuts are needed to fill a £20 billion ($27 billion) shortfall in the defense budget.