In his magisterial history of the Hundred Years War, Jonathan Sumption recounts a complaint by the 14th-century French chronicler Jean Froissart about the difficulty of negotiating with the English: “According to Froissart, it was a well-known trick of English diplomats to evade embarrassing questions by pretending not to understand them.”

It would be unfair to make the same charge against British diplomats now, but their political masters are clearly up to the old tricks. The most embarrassing question of all is: what now is Britain’s place in the world? Instead of an answer, all the rest of the world gets to hear are self-evidently evasive pomposities about a gloriously global Britain. To which the world is increasingly inclined to reply: what globe exactly do you think you’re on?

It does not seem entirely accidental that, in the past week, the three British ministers who deal most directly with the outside world have been such clownish embodiments of disarray. Defence, foreign affairs and international development are the ways in which a state formally conducts its relations with other countries.

The ministers in charge of two of them – Priti Patel and Michael Fallon – are gone from the cabinet. Whatever shred of credibility Boris Johnson had as foreign secretary has been stripped away. One of the most basic functions of any country’s foreign office is to come to the aid of its citizens when they are in trouble abroad. That he, instead, placed Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe at further risk of unjust punishment in Iran suggests a dysfunctionality. If the elementary tasks are being screwed up so badly, what chance is there of competent handling of the most complex talks in Britain’s modern history?

The coming together of these three ministerial crises may owe much to coincidence, but apparently random events have a way of exposing deeper patterns. In this case, the pattern is hardly mysterious. Since the Brexit vote, there is a concerted pretence of incomprehension in the face of other people’s alarm at what the long-time London correspondent of the New York Times, Steven Erlanger, recently called Britain’s “unmoored” position in the world.

We have been witnessing a very English farce, but one with a wholly new twist. In this version of Fawlty Towers, it is not Manuel the stereotypical foreigner who goes around saying: “Qué?” and: “I know nawthing!” It is the all-too-English Basil, acting out a pantomime of feigned perplexity.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Winston Churchill set out a vision of Britain’s place in the world as a kind of square. He knew that the pre-eminent position that victory had given Britain could not be maintained in isolation. So, he articulated a complex sense of belonging. If Britain was one side of the square, the other three were: the United States, with which it would have its famously special relationship; the Commonwealth, which would look to the mother country for leadership; and, as Brexiters like to forget, a united Europe, in which Britain would be a leading light and which, in Churchill’s words, would banish “tariff walls and passport networks”.

Brexit is a radical attempt to alter this geometry, to wrench Churchill’s square into the shape of a golden triangle of Britain, the US and the Commonwealth (reimagined in the most feverish fantasies as Empire 2.0). However, everybody knows that this is not going to happen. The only triangle it actually resembles is the mythical one off Bermuda into which flights of fancy disappear.

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the brilliant historian of postwar Britain, John Bew, suggested the only way forward was a “reinvigorated special relationship” with the US that would, in turn, open the way for a deeper British engagement with Asia. In truth, this was always likely to be a problematic notion; after all, Tony Blair’s special relationship with George W Bush hardly did much for Britain’s standing in the world. In any case, three months after Bew made this suggestion, Donald Trump was elected to the White House. The idea of Britain finding a secure place in the world as Trump’s favourite caddy is about as appealing as it is plausible.

It is true that Trump won’t always be around. However, if and when the Democrats return to power, there is no reason to think they will be any more inclined to sympathise with the Brexit project than the openly dismissive Barack Obama was before the referendum. Indeed, a fundamental problem for Britain’s place in the world is precisely that Brexit is deeply linked in international discourse with the Trump phenomenon, as two manifestations of the same reactionary breakdown. A US that is recovering its senses is highly unlikely to want to cosy up to a Britain that has locked itself permanently in its own padded cell.

‘The idea of Britain finding a secure place in the world as Trump’s favourite caddy is about as appealing as it is plausible.’ Photograph: JORGE SILVA / POOL/EPA

As far as the Commonwealth is concerned, it is striking that no one has yet been trampled in the rush to embrace the old mother country again. Most Commonwealth countries felt that they were pretty much ditched by Britain when it got into bed with Europe in 1973. Australia, for example, had to radically restructure its agricultural economy when it lost most of its access to the British market. It responded by remaking its own place in the world and becoming, in effect, a Pacific country. Maybe there is some Aussie soap opera in which the cruelly dumped lover drops everything and returns to the bastard who blew her off all those years ago, just because he clicks his fingers.

But real life is not going to be like this. All but the most deluded Brexiters know all of this very well. They know what Churchill knew – that Britain’s relationships with the rest of the world have to be anchored in its relationship with a gradually uniting Europe. They know that Brexit Britain doesn’t even have a solid relationship with the rest of the archipelago it inhabits: last week’s leaked European commission position paper raises, more starkly than ever, the impossibility of a clean Brexit that does not undermine the Northern Ireland peace settlement, prompting profound questions about the future of the UK itself.

They surely know that a country that is so deeply uncertain about where its own future borders will lie cannot deal confidently with the world beyond it. They must know, too, that reneging on the most important international commitments you have made in your modern history – the commitments of EU membership – is not a great advertisement for your potential as a future partner in international affairs. If it were, a personal ad, it would read: “Petulant bolter seeks stable, lifelong relationship”.

However, the Brexit project is a triumph of the unknown known. It is all about pretending not to understand its own obvious consequences. One of those consequences is that Britain will never be able to replace the prestige, influence and respect it has enjoyed as a leading but highly distinctive member of the EU. Bluster aside, all the Brexiters have to say about that is: “Qué?”

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times