In early 2010, Horst Köhler visited German troops serving in Afghanistan. As German president at the time, he needed to explain to a very skeptical public back home why over 6,000 soldiers serving under a NATO flag had been posted in a faraway country rife with conflict and danger.

And that is exactly what he did. Köhler told German radio that his country could no longer avoid involvement in military missions. The reason, he explained, was that those missions helped “protect our interests, for example, free trade routes, or to prevent regional instability, which might certainly have a negative effect on our trade, jobs and income.”