Germany’s New Foreign Policy: Same Reluctance to Fight

Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, whose combined populations are less than half that of their German neighbor, have sent warplanes to strike Islamic State. Germany is sitting this conflict out.

While Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is supplying weapons to Kurdish forces fighting the militants in Iraq, it has stopped short of joining the U.S.-led coalition pounding Islamic State targets from the air. It’s a decision that belies German ambitions to step up international engagement to match the country’s economic clout as Europe’s export powerhouse, and one it may have to justify at a meeting of defense chiefs in Washington today.