Opinion | The World Used to Fear German Militarism. Then It Disappeared.

Brandt was an idealist; Henry Kissinger derided him as a “political romanticist.” But he was not out of line with mainstream German politics — in 1993 the conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared that Germany soldiers should never intervene in nations in which the Wehrmacht had raged.

The conflict in the Balkans put Kohl’s doctrine to the test, and a ruling by the German Constitutional Court a year later opened the door to such deployments when it approved “out of area” — i.e., foreign — operations by the country’s armed forces. But they could do so only as part of NATO, United Nations or European Union missions.

Since then, Germany has deployed troops a handful of times, almost always in a peacekeeping role. And while it recently increased its military budget, under Chancellor Angela Merkel it has also ended its mandatory service requirement and cut the number of active-duty service members.

For Americans, these caveats may be particularly hard to understand. Historically, many in the United States have come to see war as a force for good, at least in the right hands. A “good” war, for example to end crimes against humanity, is a point of pride.

In Germany, war is always a shame, a sign of failure. The memory of war is inextricably linked to the collapse of civilization as such, to crimes so horrific and traumatic that they pose an eternal moral legacy on the Germans: never again.

In 1999, when Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, from the pacifist Green Party, argued in favor of using German arms during the Balkan wars, a fellow party member threw a balloon filled with red paint at his head. The message was clear: All war is murder, and making the case for war is the argument of a murderer.

In 2014, the chairwoman of the Protestant church in Germany, Margot Kässmann, refused to exempt even the Allied invasion of 1944 that liberated Nazi Germany from the pacifist dogma. “It certainly was a war with a good intention,” she said, “but it’s hard for me to justify war. There is only a just peace.” This is the mentality that Germany’s allies are up against.