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Defence analyst Tomas Valasek of the Centre for European Reform said NATO faced a situation reminiscent of the 1999 Kosovo air war against Serbia, when it took the veiled threat of a ground invasion to persuade then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces. Gaddafi was placing his armour in populated areas to try to provoke NATO into strikes that would kill civilians and split the coalition, peeling off Arab support. Any attempt to target Gaddafi and his entourage entailed the same risk, he said.

"What has been missing, in the debate about how countries can restore their finances to some kind of sustainability, is the limit of how much they can cut in a period of austerity," said Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Centre for European Reform in London. "There is a limit of how much any government can cut back spending and survive politically unless there is a light at the end of the tunnel, a route back to economic growth.

Charles Grant, the director of the London-based Centre for European Reform, suggests that Britain and France could form the core of a series of coalitions of the capable. Smaller nations such as Denmark and the Netherlands have shown a willingness to deploy military muscle. Spain, Poland and some others could be occasional members of such coalitions.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, is among those who believe that this month’s EU summit in Brussels might have been a fork in the road. "If you're not in the room, your influence is diminished", he said... Mr Grant worries that once 23 leaders out of 27 start to hold regular meetings, they will inevitably start to "caucus" on issues relating to the EU's single market, regardless of undertakings to the contrary.

"They haven't grasped what they have to do in terms of restructuring and recapitalising the banks," said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, a research institute. "They are behind the markets. Public opinion in Ireland and Greece on the one hand, and Germany and Netherlands on the other, is going in incompatible directions," Mr Grant said. "There may be a time when, even if politicians want to do the right things for the euro, public opinion will not allow them to."

Charles Grant, director of London-based think-tank the Centre for European Reform, told Jane's: "I think the French genuinely hope to get contracts out of it [Lifting the EU arms embargo on China]. They've had an arms export driven foreign policy for years." UK policy on the EU ban "has gone back and forth", he added. The US remains "the key" to any future change in EU policy, according to Grant: "There's no chance of it being lifted in the near future because the Americans don't want it to be.

"The EU policies just aren't mature enough or aligned enough to absorb this kind of crisis," says Hugo Brady of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank in London. "They're still in learning mode. The Europeans can't find a common line on Russia, so I don't find it so hard to believe they can't find a common line on Libya," said Brady. "Everybody takes their stand, then the event actually happens, then the EU cobbles together a policy based on the country's version that was most right, But the first principle of their action should be like the Hippocratic oath: first do no harm.

"One of the most potentially damaging things is the impact on the balance of economic philosophy within the Eurogroup," said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. "Without Britain, Sweden, Denmark or Poland, the whole thing will become more corporatist. Cameron is probably learning that he has got to work through Europe on a lot of issues, for example to reform the EU neighbourhood policy towards north Africa," Grant said. "But the risk is that you get a Britain that is half in and half out of the EU.

Clara Marina O'Donnell, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, says European defence capabilities have actually been diminished since they took part in NATO's 1995 bombing campaign in Bosnia. "Europeans would be not be prepared for any intervention in Libya now. They cannot deliver on action. In fact, Europe could [probably] not do Bosnia again", she says.