Cash, voters, and lobbies aside, something fundamental has changed in recent years, and this scares the Democrats Israel s conflict with Palestine is now being used by the American right as a cudgel to beat up liberals.

All major players in Russia s energy centric economy quickly fell into line politically, enabling Putin to use the country s oil and gas exports as a geopolitical cudgel. EU countries that he could not intimidate militarily, owing to NATO, were wooed with discounts or punished with price hikes.

Of course, Germany s eagerness to discharge the burden of history is not new. Back in 1998, the renowned intellectual Martin Walser publicly attacked the pervasiveness of Auschwitz in Germany s remembrance culture, declaring that the Holocaust had become a moral cudgel with which to intimidate all Germans and keep them in a perpetual state of guilt.