A friend who intends to vote No next month told me the other day that an independent Scotland would be a small, parochial, insignificant country unable to prosecute a foreign policy of any significance.

This view indicates the mindset of too many in the No camp. They delude themselves. They think the UK is still a significant world power. It isn't. And its foreign policy has for several generations, certainly since the Suez debacle of 1956, been characterised by incompetence and delusion.

Not so long ago David Cameron was on the verge of authorising military action against the regime of President Assad of Syria. He seemed ignorant of the fact that, if the West toppled Assad, or even just tried to, extremist anti- Western forces would have stepped into the void.

Luckily, he was prevented by a disparate but wise coalition of Opposition MPs and some of his own backbenchers. And where are we now? Amazingly, Mr Assad suddenly seems to be taking on the unlikely role of our Prime Minister's new best friend.

And it was the frequently demonised Vladimir Putin, no less, who correctly pointed out that a Western intervention against Assad would serve only to render an already very dangerous area yet more dangerous.

A few years earlier US President Barack Obama's predecessor seemed hell-bent on a military strike against Iran. Now Iran is seen by many in the West as a state of relative stability in a desperately volatile part of the world.

Both the UK and the US greeted the so- called Arab Spring with ingenuous enthusiasm. Of course it's easy to be wise with hindsight: but then the UK - and its taxpayers - spend vast amounts of money on a grandiose foreign service. We have very highly paid diplomats and security advisers in place all over the world.

Do these people begin to justify their expensive existence? And if they do understand what's going on, do they communicate effectively with their supposed masters back in London?

When the late Robin Cook became UK Foreign Secretary in 1997 he was, among many other things, this newspaper's guest racing tipster. Shortly after he started his new job I phoned him, assuming that he would want to quit. (As it happened, he bravely carried on for a few months, though his son Christopher did most of the research for the tips.).

I asked Mr Cook how he was settling into his new job. He was frank: he did not like the Foreign Office's pervasive stuffiness. Its excessive grandeur embarrassed him. He felt its very size encouraged an unrealistic, out-of-time mindset. He told me that someone had actually mentioned to him, with apparent pride, that the Foreign Secretary's office was so big that it could accommodate three London double-decker buses.

Always an unusual politician, Robin Cook was soon demanding that the Sporting Life should be added to his daily pile of newspapers, which already included The Herald. He also placed a stuffed stoat on his huge desk. These were thought-out gestures; there was method is his apparent frivolity.

He reckoned that the FO was still suffering from an imperial hangover. He wanted to bring it, and in particular its senior officials, down to earth. He tried to introduce a more modest, more realistic and more ethical foreign policy. He probably failed. But he was up against the forces of delusion and pomposity, which probably pervaded his own party just as much as the Tories.

Not much has changed in the intervening 17 years. British foreign policy remains unrealistic, influenced more by supposed past glories than by current necessities.

An independent Scotland would have modest and achievable aims beyond Scotland. It would understand its place in the world; it would respect other nations. It would not be concerned with retaining illusory influence, with seats at so-called top tables, with punching above its weight, with grandiose attempts to influence or even orchestrate world events.

It would be decent and straightforward. It would simply try to look after Scotland's interests in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.