This book is about the transformation of Germany?s security and defense policy in the time between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 war in Iraq. The book traces and explains the reaction of Europe?s biggest and potentially most powerful country to the ethnic wars of the 1990s, the emergence of large-scale terrorism, and the new US emphasis on pre-emptive strikes. Based on an analysis of Germany?s strategic culture it portrays Germany as a security actor and indicates the conditions and limits of the new German willingness to participate in international military crisis management that developed over the 1990s.