One important omission is therefore that there is no analysis "fit for purpose". Nor is there an answer to the question "who are we?" which we must know before we can specify our Ends. What the PASC documents here is equally distressing. The "UK" in question is not a place that Castlereagh, Balfour or Churchill would have recognised. Smuggled here are huge assumptions about the gradual subsuming of our sovereign powers into multilateral entities of presumed power, benignity and longevity: all contestable. 

Most contestable and most cited are the UN and the EU, where a harmony of British interests with those of continental European powers is presumed, flying in the face of history and current experience. The refrain from SDSR authors and advisers is that Britain is now a regional power with some global interests. The idea of British global influence is now mere rhetoric, they think. This is the jolly view of globalisation on the road to cosmopolitan civility, with aspirations for strengthening international law, which has colonised much of Whitehall. In contrast, I see globalisation as increased cyber, financial and material networking, within the bleaker reality of a decreasingly policed international space. This is the great intellectual divide of our times in describing international affairs. The defence and security choices that each analysis recommends are very different.

In short, the worldview of the civil service authors of the SDSR is little changed from that which they proffered in the Brown government's Defence Green Paper last year, which flowed from many of the same minds. And it does not sit well with the Foreign Secretary William Hague's Palmerstonian aspirations for British foreign policy. 

What should we make of this, the consequence of a generation-long narrative of self-denigration? Here is what Shakespeare had to say in Richard II:

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leased out — I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement or pelting farm:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. 

Notice Shakespeare's mordant anticipation of the Lisbon Treaty. Candidly, Castlereagh's great State Paper of 1820 is a better strategic guide for British policy today than this limp National Security Strategy which we now know did not frame the cuts but, rather, was a belated fig-leaf of respectability.