WITH the general election just a month away, foreign eyes are turning to Britain. But they are not noticing the lean state and the triumphantly growing economy that the prime minister, David Cameron, is boasting of, nor the profound debate about equality that the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, wants to have. Instead, they see a gap where Britain should be on the international-relations radar.

Russian aggression is not limited to Ukraine: the country’s bombers are now testing Britain’s air defences as frequently as they did at the height of the cold war. Meanwhile hundreds of radicalised young Britons have gone to fight for Islamic State (IS) in Syria and their jihadist colleagues are ostentatiously murdering Christians on Mediterranean beaches in Libya. “Every witness to our committee, from Henry Kissinger to Madeleine Albright, says these are the most tumultuous times they have seen in their lives,” says John McCain, chairman of the armed services committee in America’s Senate. Yet Britain is cutting back on defence—something that, he says, “diminishes Britain’s ability to influence events”.

Margaret Thatcher saw herself, and was seen, as an essential partner of two American presidents. She stoutly defended nuclear deterrence when she thought her friend and ideological soulmate, Ronald Reagan, was getting carried away in talks with the Russians. Tony Blair pushed NATO and Bill Clinton into military action in Kosovo. Ill-fated though the later invasion of Iraq proved, Mr Blair was never an American poodle. He believed that Britain should be in the first rank of countries prepared to counter the threat of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Even the maligned Gordon Brown co-ordinated the international response to the financial crash of 2008.

David Cameron came to office in 2010 promising a different kind of foreign policy, but still a highly active one. The notion that Britain was fated to play a smaller role in the world, the prime minister said in a 2010 speech, was simply wrong. It had the fourth-biggest defence budget in the world. It had a deep, close relationship with America and was an active member of the European Union. It also had great commercial strengths, which—and this was the new idea—it could use to enhance its status. “Few countries on earth have this powerful combination of assets, and even fewer have the ability to make the best use of them,” he boasted.

Those assets have instead been depleted and squandered. Britain has run down its armed forces: its defence budget has slipped from being the world’s fourth- biggest to its sixth (see chart). The ending of NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan at the end of last year supposedly drew a line under difficult counter-insurgency campaigns in distant places. Any remaining appetite for adventures abroad was sated by the 2011 intervention in Libya, which drew attention to dwindling military resources and the perils of plunging in without having a follow-up plan.

Since then Britain has become ever more unwilling to deploy the diplomatic and military resources it does possess. For a country that has long been respected for the skills of its diplomats, the professionalism and dash of its armed forces, the global outlook of its political leaders and its ability to punch above its weight, the decline has been unmistakable. Hosting NATO’s summit in Wales last September, Mr Cameron cajoled other countries into pledging to follow Britain’s example and spend 2% of their GDP on defence—as all are supposed to do. Yet in December his chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, was announcing spending plans for the next parliament that implied not only that Britain would fall just short of the NATO target in the coming fiscal year (to 1.95%, despite including war pensions in the defence budget for the first time) but that it would go on falling.

Pound foolish

This is because Mr Osborne has decreed that Britain is only halfway through necessary cuts to departmental spending, and defence is not one of the three “ring-fenced” departments (health, education and overseas aid). In interviews following his budget speech on March 18th, Mr Osborne repeatedly refused to say that a Conservative government would keep its own 2% promise.

Malcolm Chalmers of RUSI, a London-based think-tank, calculates that if another Tory-led government sticks to its fiscal plans, the Ministry of Defence might face a 10% real cut in spending over the next five years at a time when both personnel and equipment costs will rise faster than inflation. What makes the squeeze even tighter is that, towards the end of the period, the first of two new aircraft-carriers will be entering service—requiring expensive F-35s to fly from it—and construction of four new Trident ballistic-missile submarines will also be under way. Even if the government sticks to an earlier promise to increase equipment spending by 1% from next year and hold the rest of the budget flat in real terms, Britain would still spend only about 1.75% of its GDP on defence by 2019, compared with 2.6% in 2010.

This matters. Kori Schake, a former security official in Republican administrations, now at the Hoover Institution, says Washington sees the 2% figure as totemic. “We think of Britain as the standard-bearer for allied behaviour,” she says. More pragmatically, Ray Odierno, America’s army chief, wonders whether in future Britain will have enough soldiers to work alongside an American division. On the most pessimistic of Mr Chalmers’s calculations, the British army, already shrinking from 102,000 to 82,000 soldiers, could end up with around 50,000.

Shrinking violent

Britain is much less engaged overseas, both militarily and diplomatically. Mr Cameron has left the difficult and unsavoury job of dealing with Vladimir Putin to other European leaders, principally Angela Merkel. Britain’s contribution to the fight against IS in Iraq has been about one air strike a day. Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, ruled out any action against the group in Syria, saying, not accurately, that Parliament had already voted against it—a reference to the bungled debate in August 2013, when Mr Cameron sought and failed to win approval for punishing President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

“In this job I travel a lot and I had underestimated the extent to which our allies expect us to be there when it counts,” says Michael Clarke, RUSI’s director. “They are disappointed when we are not and they note the reduced ambition.” It does not help, he says, that President Barack Obama has rarely set a firm or consistent foreign-policy course that Britain could follow. Yet when American leadership has wavered in the past, British prime ministers have helped stiffen their spines.

François Heisbourg of La Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, a think-tank in Paris, draws a different comparison. Although an Anglo-French defence treaty signed in 2010 has led to much co-operation, even over nuclear weapons, the French notice Britain’s lost appetite for military expeditions. Mr Heisbourg says: “The French still think they can make a difference and if they can, they should. Take Boko Haram. Where are the Brits in Nigeria?” France has fought Islamist insurgents in Mali, a former French colony, and is trying to unite Chad and other neighbouring countries against Boko Haram.

Morale at the once-mighty Foreign and Commonwealth Office is low. Mr Blair undermined it by moving foreign policy to 10 Downing Street, and it has suffered years of neglect. “You can see how its Russian expertise has been hollowed out,” says one of the country’s most senior former ambassadors. “When the Ukraine crisis happened, the old cold-war cadre of people just wasn’t there.” He blames Mr Osborne for dictating a mercantilist foreign policy, lamenting “the kowtowing to China”.

Scarce diplomatic resources have been poured into Beijing and an ambassador has been appointed to The Association of South-East Asian Nations. Admittedly, Britain’s pivot to Asia is not just about trade: diplomats are engaged in trying to stop conflicts in Mindanao and Myanmar. By contrast, despite the huge amount of development aid Africa receives from Britain each year, that rising continent has been largely ignored by senior politicians.

The Foreign Office’s puny annual spending of about £1.6 billion (a cut of 16% in real terms since 2010, nearer 30% if the money that used to fund the BBC World Service is included) compares with the largesse showered on the Department for International Development (DfID), which will enjoy a budget of over £11 billion, and rising, this year. While refusing to commit Britain to the 2% target for defence spending, the government was nonetheless happy last month to confirm that, regardless of circumstances, DfID would receive each year 0.7% of GDP. Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, a leading academic strategist, reports “a striking decline in interest in international affairs at the senior levels of politics. It was surprising to see the parties tie their hands in this way. DfID doesn’t do foreign policy.” A further reason for the Foreign Office’s sense of impotence is that it has been uncomfortable with the government’s approach to the EU. The perception that Britain has become a semi-detached member, and perhaps fully detached if Mr Cameron’s gamble of holding an in-or-out referendum in 2017 goes wrong, is hard to argue with. Although Britain has always preferred a transactional approach to the EU, Mr Cameron has sought to do deals without forming the relationships that would make them possible. From his ineffective “veto” of a fiscal treaty in 2011 to his ill-fated attempt to halt Jean-Claude Juncker’s campaign to become president of the European Commission last year, Mr Cameron has repeatedly got it wrong, finding himself isolated with little to show for his intransigence. One reason for his failure is that when Mr Cameron was battling for the Tory leadership a decade ago, he courted Eurosceptics by promising to leave the centre-right European People’s Party group in the European Parliament. That cut him off from vital political intelligence. Remaining outside the euro, while unquestionably a blessing for the economy, has also contributed to Britain’s separateness. But Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, believes that the euro is not the issue: “Look at Tony Blair at his best. The problem now is a lack of ambition. We are capable of leading on a range of issues—climate, energy, trade, the single market, defence, foreign policy. But too often we don’t even when we could.”

Two of the EU’s great achievements—the creation of the single market in the 1980s and eastward expansion in the 2000s—were championed by Britain. Its liberal, free-market instincts have countered the protectionist tendencies of the French and others, while its permanent membership of the UN Security Council and its nuclear deterrent have given the EU strategic heft. Those days now seem largely gone. Tough but fair pursuit of Britain’s national interest has been replaced by point-scoring and posturing, say Eurocrats.

Mr Cameron’s promise of a referendum has done less damage than the rhetoric that has followed it. At times he has come close to disparaging the cherished principle of free movement of European citizens across borders. The government’s anti-immigration rhetoric has damaged relations with natural allies such as Poland, according to Mr Grant. (It has also annoyed well-to-do Indians, who used to send their children to British universities but now favour America.)

The failure to nurture relationships with potential allies or to understand how the EU works might mean that Mr Cameron gets less help in resetting the terms of British membership than he hopes for. British ministers have a reputation for arrogantly ignoring smaller member countries, while at least two larger ones, Spain and France, would not be all that sorry to see Britain leave the EU. Mr Heisbourg says: “The French elite finds living with the UK a pain. ‘Brexit’ is not an unpleasant prospect to some of them, if it means investors deserting Britain.”

One-legged stool

It is possible that more money will be found for defence; that if the Conservatives win the general election they will go on to win a referendum on EU membership; that once the election is out of the way, the next government will make a concerted effort to show that Britain can regain the confidence of allies and the respect of foes. But the converse is also possible. And it is hard to imagine that a minority Labour government supported in office by the Scottish National Party (SNP) offers a happier prospect. Ed Miliband beat his brother in the race to lead Labour partly by loudly (and retrospectively) opposing the Iraq war, while the SNP wants to scrap Trident.

Xenia Wickett, head of American affairs at Chatham House, a London think-tank, puts the view of Britain’s most important ally succinctly. As far as Washington is concerned, the relationship rests on a three-legged stool. The first is respect for Britain’s military and intelligence capabilities; the second is Britain’s EU membership; the third is Britain’s “soft power” in Washington. There it has traditionally been both a trusted partner with a sometimes different perspective on world affairs, and one that sends a message internationally that America is not acting unilaterally. “Cuts in defence would crumble the first leg,” she says, and “leaving the EU would destroy the second. The third might survive, but stools don’t balance on one leg.”