A LIST of recent meetings between Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders might suggest that Germany has joined the ranks of diplomatic heavyweights. This month she stared down Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. Mr Putin had threatened not to appear with Mrs Merkel at an exhibition in St Petersburg that included art looted by Soviet soldiers from Germany after the second world war. Mrs Merkel let it be known that she might cut her visit short. Mr Putin gave in and joined her at the show, where Mrs Merkel said bluntly that, according to international law, looted art should make its way home.

A few days earlier Barack Obama, America’s president, had visited Mrs Merkel in Berlin, where he nudged Germany privately and publicly to join America in taking on global challenges. And in May Li Keqiang, prime minister of China, came by to call Germany and China “a dream couple” (and to win German support against tariffs the European Union wanted to impose on cheap Chinese solar panels).

When Mrs Merkel gets on well with leaders, their countries yearn for a bigger German diplomatic role. When she has differences, they often wish for the opposite. This week the opening of a new chapter in Turkey’s desultory negotiations to join the EU was delayed until the autumn, because of German criticism of Turkey’s crackdown on protesters. Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu is still smarting from Mrs Merkel’s decision last November to abstain in a UN General Assembly vote on upgrading the status of Palestine (he had expected a no vote). Germany usually feels obliged to back Israel, but Mrs Merkel was disappointed by Mr Netanyahu’s half-hearted peace efforts and his tattling to the Israeli press about matters she had told him in confidence.

Yet the appearance of a more assertive German diplomacy is deceptive. “Today Berlin is on everybody’s itinerary,” says Volker Perthes of the German Institute for International and Security Policy (SWP), a think-tank. But that is because Germany is economically strong when much of Europe is weak. When it comes to geopolitics, he says, Germany still finds it “more comfortable” to leave the lead to America, Britain and France.

This explains Germany’s reluctance to play a role when it really matters. In 2011, when the UN Security Council voted on Libya, Germany abstained (joining Russia and China rather than its traditional NATO allies, Britain, France and America). Ever since, the rest of NATO has seen Germany as less than reliable, argues Judy Dempsey, author of “The Merkel Phenomenon”. The disaster was complete when Germany was praised by Muammar Qaddafi.

Something similar occurred when France intervened in Mali to repel an Islamist takeover. Germany offered only feeble support with a few transport aircraft. As the world ponders whether to intervene in Syria, with Russia pitted against the West, hopes among diplomats are low that Germany will do anything at all.

This German “complacency and laziness” is “immature” and leads, in effect, to “a geostrategic vacuum in the middle of Europe”, argues Jan Techau, director of Carnegie Europe, a foreign-policy think-tank in Brussels. It is a legacy of Germany’s post-war status, when it had at first no foreign policy independent of the allies, and subsequently defined foreign policy purely in the context of German reunification and the cold war.

Up-and-coming German politicians, unlike their counterparts in America, Britain or France, do not see foreign-policy expertise as part of their career path. (Even Germany’s best-known post-war foreign ministers, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Joschka Fischer, started with a domestic focus.) There are few foreign-policy think-tanks, and diplomacy and strategy are not big subjects in universities.

Another inhibitor, Mr Techau says, is Germany’s post-war need for complete moral clarity before doing anything. Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, joined the American-led bombing in Kosovo in 1999 to prevent a Serbian slaughter of Albanians. But foreign policy often has to deal with ethically murky situations. This “fear of becoming the instrument of evil again”—arming Syrian rebels who turn out to be jihadists, for example—leads to diplomatic paralysis, says Mr Techau.

It thus makes little sense to speak of realism or idealism among Germany’s diplomatic elite, as in other countries. Nor are there big differences among political parties. (The Greens, with a moralistic streak, have a few “liberal hawks”, and the ex-Communist Left Party has a nationalistic streak, says Mr Perthes, but both are outside the mainstream.) Instead, the default position remains military and diplomatic restraint. Often this takes the form of lip-service to international rules, regimes and organisations, with an associated abdication of specifically German responsibility.

As a big exporter, Germany has national interests and slyly defends them. Thus it helps to fight pirates off the Horn of Africa to keep sea lanes open. But when in 2010 a German president, Horst Köhler, stated the obvious—that trade was a national interest, and the armed forces must be hypothetically available to defend it—he sparked an outcry and had to resign. Given the euro crisis and the weakness of France, its long-standing senior partner, Germany has become Europe’s leader largely by default. But on the wider world stage the country will remain notable mainly for its absence, no matter who runs it.