I am grateful to Wolfgang Wagner for his thoughtful and well-considered review of my book. Although it seems to me that we see eye to eye on the big issues, Wagner does raise a number of interesting points of criticism. First, Wagner observes that my focus on the larger development toward increased German military involvement abroad comes at the expense of finer nuances. To Wagner, the latter are the more interesting aspect, specifically the question why some operations “have become accepted whereas others (still) have not,” especially given the broader development of “Western” interventionism. Second, he argues that a comparative approach would have revealed additional insight on the specifics of the German case.

Wagner is certainly right to point to the potential benefit of a comparative perspective, as well as to the many nuances, ambivalences, and contradictions that characterize individual decisions on deployments. Part of the book’s focus is of course pragmatic, but it also reflects differing takes on what the puzzle is. To Wagner, the comparative scholar, party-political, cross-case, and cross-national differences are (not entirely without reason) the most fascinating issue, but from a (broadly) critical perspective, the expansion of Germany’s international military role is indeed very much in need of explanation. Similarly, whether one sees post-unification German security policy mainly as a gradual expansion or a contradictory, interrupted, ambivalent, contested—in short, messy—development is a matter of perspective. Thus, in my previous work with Martin Nonhoff comparing Afghanistan and Iraq, we zoomed in on exactly these nuances. In contrast, from this book’s bird’s-eye view, the development since the 1990s appears more like a continuous development toward expansion—a gradual, complicated, interrupted, contradictory development, to be sure, but one of expansion nonetheless.

Wagner also directs our attention to the embeddedness of the German security discourse in the larger context of other national, international (e.g., NATO), and transnational (for example, media) security discourses. Although this issue did not feature prominently in my book, mainly for pragmatic reasons, I do concur that the “Western” security-political convergence towards interventionist policies is important. This development is especially influential in Germany because the risk of another potentially disastrous “special path” looms large in German political discourse. Although “Western” interventionism is already a prominent topic in critical security studies, I agree that a comparative perspective could be very helpful here.

This brings me to the issue of coloniality. Limited space does not allow me to elaborate on this in detail, but although I consider German colonialism more important than Wagner seems to do—historical scholarship suggests that the influence of colonial discourse is larger than the brief phase of German colonialism would indicate (cf. Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism, 2012)—I would argue that transnational diffusion is an important factor accounting for the prominence of colonial arguments in the German discourse. The reason for these arguments’ influence is their prominence in international elite discourses and transnational media discourses in which German decision makers and citizens are embedded. Despite all the differences, however, Wagner’s and my work both highlight the importance of domestic contestation, which is an indispensable factor if we aim to better understand how foreign policy works.