By Sam Kiley (Foreign News Editor, Sky News)

Small island with a tiny military continues to not bomb Syria – not exactly the most compelling headline; but pretty close to the truth of how Britain is now being seen in the world.

Thanks to a meandering and, in the view of Washington mandarins too polite to say so publicly, pusillanimous approach to the war against so-called Islamic State - Britain risks "Hollandisation".

The clumsy new term suggests  a nice place with some lovely buildings, clever people, and not much influence, somewhere in Europe.

Except that, as far as the Americans are concerned, and they are the Anglo-Saxon superpower that has usurped the increasingly disunited Kingdom, Britain shows signs of floating away from the European mothership where the combined muscle of the Old World might have been combined and where London might have been dominant.

So UK Plc is now being seen as nothing much more than that.

An economic bridgehead into Europe, so long as it stays in Europe, a hedge-fund paradise of invisible exports which has locked America’s great new rival, China, in a harlot's embrace.

"It's difficult, no it is impossible, to imagine a US administration that would allow massive Chinese investment in nuclear power inside America at a time when the People's Liberation Army of China is hacking every goddam government agency it can," said a senior official in Washington.

"China is already engaged in cyber mass espionage – that's not the behaviour of a business partner you can trust with strategic assets."

According to Number 10, there will be no vote on expanding the bombing campaign into Syria until there is an obvious consensus behind it in Parliament – even though allowing it now would be a good thing.

This, again, tells friend and foe that Britain doesn't have a strategy nor a leadership prepared to forge and sell one to its public.

Commons foreign affairs committee chairman Crispin Blunt said: "We are concerned that the Government is focusing on extending air strikes to Syria, responding to the powerful sense that something must be done to tackle ISIL in Syria, without any expectation that its action will be militarily decisive, and without a coherent and long-term plan for defeating ISIL and ending the civil war."

Britain’s armed forces are small – there are just over 183,000 members of the US Marine Corps and 144,000 people in the Royal Navy, the Army and the RAF combined.

But Britain still has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and (had) historic and cultural influence far beyond its economic and military might.

But Mr Blunt perhaps unwittingly hinted at where Britain could get back into the game – if its leadership wanted to play.

"There is now a miscellany of uncoordinated military engagements by an alarming range of international actors in Iraq and Syria, all of whom share an interest in defeating ISIL and who between them possess an overwhelming capability to do so," he said.

"These forces desperately need coordinating into a coherent strategy and that is where our efforts should be focused."

That means there is a place, and a welcome one, to help take the lead in the coalition against IS to develop a winning strategy.

But there's no sign that anyone in Britain can do that when the Government can't win the argument in its own shrinking back yard.

(Sky News)