Earlier this year, that shrewdest of vintage statesmen, Lord Carrington, with the combined authority of a former United Kingdom Defence Secretary and Foreign Secretary and Nato Secretary General, suggested that Britain would soon have to confront the question of whether or not it wished to remain in the “big league” of world players. Within months, Syria’s use of chemical weapons posed exactly that question. Did the subsequent vote in the House of Commons and the opinion polls reflect a wish on the part of the British to have a rest for a while from the wider globe or will the events of August 2013 prove to be a benchmark – a contour crossed in a downward direction to lesser slopes of reach and ambition in the world? During the fallout from the lost Commons vote,