Few countries have reckoned with their own past as thoroughly as Germany, and yet history still has a way of contaminating nearly every issue in its foreign policy. Much of this is imposed from outside with more than a little sleight of hand: debtor countries invoking the Nazi period to avoid German creditors, human rights abusers recalling the Third Reich to shame Berlin out of sanctions, weak European Union members lamenting the supposed return of a German-dominated Europe.
Some of it, however, is self-inflicted. German officials have been known to wiggle out of higher defense spending by implying that maybe they shouldn’t be trusted with it, German CEOs have implausibly claimed ignorance of detention camps near their factories in China, and German leaders defend business deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war debt for Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
