When Germany joins a military campaign, that is news. So when Berlin recently signed up to the coalition against the militant Islamists of Isis (something it had previously ruled out), the world took note.
Among states, willingness to fend off threats or pursue the national interest with force is akin to proof of machismo. Germany’s postwar reluctance has saddled it with the reputation of being — take your pick — shackled by remorse for the second world war and the Holocaust, a feckless security free-rider with a gimlet eye for deals with dictators, or a vegetarian post-Kantian pacifist. Forget our economic heft and newly muscular diplomacy: in military terms, our allies see us as Europe’s metrosexual power.
They have a point. Germany inched its way into post-cold war military deployments (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo) only cautiously and slowly. It refused to join US-led coalitions to depose Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi — the latter despite the fact that the operation was sanctioned by a UN Security Council resolution and international law.