HAS once-staunch Britain become an unreliable ally, without its former appetite for military intervention in a good cause? David Cameron’s failure last week to persuade the House of Commons to support him in his call for military action against the regime of Bashar Assad has raised the question. Handled better, the vote might have gone the other way (see Bagehot). Yet a large part of Britain’s military, diplomatic and intelligence establishment also responded to the prospect of action against Mr Assad with a marked lack of enthusiasm. That may well prove more significant in the long term than the outcome of a single Commons vote.

At a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) on August 28th, on the eve of Mr Cameron’s defeat in Parliament, there was unanimity among the politicians present, but a mood of weary resignation among some officials. Questions were raised that the prime minister appeared ill-prepared to answer. Had the possible consequences of military intervention been examined? What political outcome was being sought? And what if Mr Assad was not deterred from using chemical weapons by an initial attack?

The reasons for the anxiety are various. Most obvious is the shadow cast by Iraq and Afghanistan, prolonged campaigns with confused ends and messy outcomes that lost the support of the public. The dilemma for the armed forces, according to Professor Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on war studies at Oxford University, is that they want to be used (if they are not, they are out of job), but they are wary of entanglement in another unpopular enterprise. “They don’t want to get their hands caught in the mangle again,” he says.

The distrustful mood is also a reaction to morale-sapping budget cuts to the armed forces. In the past decade Britain’s military ambition has often exceeded the means politicians have allowed it. In Libya the RAF, running out of kit, struggled to maintain the tempo of operations.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest doubts have come from within the Ministry of Defence and from the leadership of the army in particular. Sir David Richards, the previous chief of the defence staff, who retired last month, had made no secret of his concerns about intervening in Syria.

Sir David, like most senior soldiers, believes that there should be a high level of confidence that military action will make things better rather than risking a deterioration. Few of his former colleagues believe that involvement in an ethnic civil war in a volatile region of the world passes that test. There is also some frustration that Mr Cameron shows more interest in new military adventures than in committing himself to the partial success in Afghanistan that they still believe possible.

Over at the Foreign Office, senior diplomats are only marginally keener on military action in Syria than their counterparts in the armed forces. There was unhappiness at the insistence of Mr Cameron and his foreign secretary, William Hague, that there could be no political solution that included Mr Assad. The diplomats think this has closed down efforts to try and engage Russia in any peace process. Had Mr Cameron linked the limited military intervention he was seeking with the possibility of new diplomatic initiatives, he might have won more support. Some critics also suggest that the government’s emphasis on turning ambassadors into glorified trade emissaries has weakened their ability to carry out their traditional diplomatic role.

As for Britain’s intelligence service, MI6, determined not to be associated with another Iraq-style “dodgy dossier”, it was circumspect to a fault. The material handed to Mr Cameron by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) as ammunition for his Commons speech was feeble compared with the damning evidence forcefully deployed by John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, little more than 24 hours later. The JIC’s tentative conclusion that chemical-weapon use by the Syrian regime was only “highly likely” left Mr Cameron talking about a matter of “judgment”, when he should have been able to say that the evidence of large-scale chemical weapons use by Mr Assad’s forces was beyond reasonable doubt—the requirement for a conviction in a court of law.

Inevitably, the concerns of the spies, generals and diplomats percolated through to the Commons debate on August 29th. Of those 63 Conservative MPs who did not vote for the government motion, a noticeably high number are close to military and diplomatic types, notes one of their number.

But the broader problem underlying Mr Cameron’s difficulties is not just a sceptical military and diplomatic establishment, but a lack of anything that looks like a strategy. Ever since it became apparent, the best part of a year ago, that Mr Assad’s capacity for survival had been underestimated, there has been a policy vacuum on Syria, not helped by the distaste of President Obama for any direct involvement in the Middle East’s agony. Even attempts to agree on arming moderate rebels quickly petered out.

The NSC was meant to help fill the gap in Britain’s ability to do strategy. But, while a useful forum for senior politicians and officials to discuss the issues of the day, it is yet to rise to this task. In a new book, “Britain’s Generals and Blair’s Wars”, Professor Strachan observes that the NSC’s lack of strategic staff or of a well-resourced secretariat capable of more hands-on management is “a serious weakness”.

Indeed, one of the more extraordinary aspects of last week’s parliamentary unravelling is how little consideration there appears to have been of the potential repercussions of the prime minister’s isolation on a matter of war and peace. Among the questions now being asked is what this means for Britain’s pre-eminent security relationship with America, and what damage it will do to the more recent and more fragile defence partnership with France, strengthened by recent interventions in Libya and Mali. Andrew Roberts, an historian, decried the developments as a “path to international irrelevance”.

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Britain’s ambassador in Washington until last year, does not believe that a single incident, however dramatic, will affect the deep security ties with America. However, he cautions that the Americans will now be looking closely at Britain’s further conduct, not least the questions of whether it maintains a respectable level of military spending, stays in the European Union and is willing to play an active role in the Middle East and north Africa. Others warn that defence cuts have left Britain with fewer readily deployable forces and that this will reduce its capacity for influence.

Yet few policymakers believe this episode will hobble Britain’s reputation as badly as the Suez crisis did in 1956. Britain remains one of only four countries in the world (America, France and Israel are the others) that can quickly project significant military force. It has two new aircraft-carriers on the way and respected special forces. There will be many further opportunities for London to wield its hard power if it wants to. But the legacy of a lost vote is that the bar for doing so has become higher—and the questions about the country’s strategic priorities a lot more searching.