A YEAR ago Germany’s elite launched a giant debate about the country’s foreign policy. There was a perception abroad, President Joachim Gauck said in a solemn speech, that Germany was “the shirker in the international community” and had used its Nazi past as an excuse to duck out of rough-and-tumble diplomacy.

Soon after, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister, began an earnest public consultation called Review 2014. It involved 60 town-hall meetings with German voters and online debates with foreign experts. All were asked: what is wrong with German foreign policy and how should it change? The reactions, some vague and some utopian, were released in a big data dump this week.

Germany should be an “intercultural arbitrator”, went one idea. It should “Europeanise Russia” and “multilateralise America”, was another. The aim of this elaborate exchange was to bridge a yawning gap between other countries’ expectations and domestic scepticism. When the Körber Foundation, a think-tank, asked if Germany should “be more engaged internationally”, 37% of Germans said yes and 60% said no. With patient debate, the elite hoped, the public would gradually accept a bigger diplomatic role.

But world events did not wait for the Germans to deliberate. Russia violated the integrity of Ukraine, and thus the entire legal order that governed Europe. Then Greek voters revived the euro crisis by rebelling against austerity which they blame on Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Both crises place Germany at centre-stage while other Western powers are distracted, weak or absent. Britain’s role has been negligible. France is mired in Africa. America, preoccupied elsewhere, has been hoping Europe will handle Ukraine. As diplomats note, German leadership is taking shape faster than anyone planned.

So it was by default rather than intent that Germany so rapidly became a “middle power”, to use a term now fashionable in Berlin. Its new engagement is evident in the awe-inspiring stamina of Mrs Merkel’s diplomacy. In one recent week, she shuttled between Berlin, Kiev, Munich, Washington, Ottawa, Minsk and Brussels on consecutive days. In Minsk, as the picture shows, she negotiated through the night for more than 17 hours with four complicated men (the presidents of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and France).

The result of that marathon, a second attempt at a ceasefire in Ukraine, never inspired much confidence. Yet Mrs Merkel believes it is always better to keep talking than to stoke conflict. She was seven when the Berlin Wall was built, she told a security conference in Munich this month, glancing at American legislators who were urging her to arm Ukraine. The West did not react to the wall with escalation, but held firm for 28 years until it prevailed: that was the only way forward now, she suggested.

For all the new activism, German foreign policy still has distinctive features, mostly legacies of a culture of atonement. The first is insistence that Germany must never be isolated; it must act with partners and institutions. In Minsk Mrs Merkel had in tow François Hollande of France, Germany’s partner in the European “tandem”. (He looked like her “notary”, it was said.)

In this spirit, Germany eagerly adopts any diplomatic jargon that suggests togetherness, such as a “Weimar triangle” (of Poland, France and Germany) or a “Normandy format” (of Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France). In the euro crisis German officials make sure that they have support from other members of the euro group.

Another hallmark of German style is wariness of one basic tool of foreign policy: armed force. True, Germany does its bit for NATO and sent troops to Kosovo and Afghanistan; but those forces were mainly in a support role and tried to avoid firefights. It is now actively helping NATO’s efforts to react faster in eastern Europe. With Dutch help it started this month to build a “spearhead force” that can be deployed in two or three days. With Poland and Denmark, it is expanding NATO’s eastern command centre in Szczecin. But outside its collaborative role in NATO, Germany still hews closely to its post-war pacifism. In the fight against Islamic State it sends kit but no soldiers. In the Ukraine crisis Mrs Merkel has ruled out arms shipments or any military response, with a firmness that sounds dogmatic to many American or British ears.

Compared with Britain and France, nuclear and globally oriented powers, Germany has a modest military budget (see chart). To their martial allies, German foreign-policy thinkers retort that disavowing conflict makes sense for a “middle power” which could not defeat, say,Vladimir Putin, or bear the cost in lives. Better, then, to stick with economic and political sanctions.

Neither style nor instruments amount to a strategy. Does Germany have one? It certainly has a wish-list. One is to prevent crises surging into full-fledged war. (Mrs Merkel and Mr Steinmeier have been poring over the events of July 1914, when Europe sleepwalked into total conflict.) Another desire is moral clarity. This reflects the country’s trauma over its past, says Jan Techau of Carnegie Europe, a think-tank. But such clarity is not always available in foreign policy and war, with their collateral damage and murky ethics. A third wish is to defend the international system of rules. In Ukraine this includes the integrity of borders and the country’s right to self-determination. In the euro zone it translates into reminding countries like Greece of commitments they have made, and refusing to bend treaties. A fourth objective is maintaining unity of the EU, NATO and the West. But strategy is most needed when an existing international order threatens to collapse. In this sense, says Gustav Gressel of the European Council on Foreign Relations, Germany’s strategy might at best be described as “save the rest”. In the euro zone Germany and others have built a firewall around the remaining currency area in case Greece exits. Cutting off the Greeks would need toughness and willingness to incur hatred. Germany is fast learning to deal with both.

Meanwhile Germany has implicitly accepted that Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine are lost. It wants to stop the fire spreading to the rest of Ukraine and neighbouring states. But “save the rest” falls short as a strategy against foes such as Mr Putin, who might view it as an incentive to keep reducing that salvageable remainder.

To be credible, strategy needs a full tool-box, for “diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments” as Frederick the Great said. But with voters still insisting on ethical clarity, Germany lacks the consensus to be a confident leader. Its allies should not expect too much too soon.