alt Hacker NewsI remember studying pre-WWI history, and particularly how carefully Bismarck arranged German foreign policy like he was the diplomatic equivalent of Bobby Fischer. Everything was situated perfectly and Germany was totally content.
Then along came the absolute moron Wilhelm, and he managed to Leroy Jenkins Germany's beautifully arranged relationships into an aggressive, tactless nightmare where all Germany's allies were turned into enemies, and everything turned out exactly like you'd expect.
As the saying goes, history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes.
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Who would you say the Bismarck equivalent for the USA is/was?
I don't think you can compare pre-WWI Germany to the US for many reasons. In the colonial era, Germany as a fairly new state and unlike the UK, Spain, France, even Portugal or the Netherlands, they didn't have colonies to exploit. Worse, in the industrialization era they didn't have access to oil.
This created a paranoia in Germany, an insecurity that were between Great Powers and were dependent on imports and poorer than their neighbours. They felt like they'd eventually get swallowed unless they did something and the end result was WWI. And WW2 if you think about it.
The cost of victory against Germany (twice) was huge. All those Great Powers lost their colonies and they impoverished themselves with war economies while enriching the United States who, at times, sold arms to all sides.
The US is that Great Power now, complete with colonies. It's energy independent too. So it's nohting like Germany. In fact it's turned Europe into a client state (ie through NATO). These aren't colonies in the British Empire sense of occupying India, for example. It's economic colonialism. The Global South is controlled via the IMF and World Bank. The developed world is controlled with security gurantees.
But where I agree with you is that an absolutel moron has come along and threatens to dismantle this entire system. That's what's happening. Splintering NATO, abolishing USAID, etc all diminish American soft (and hard) power.
China's foreign policy has become to sit and wait while the US destroys itself. They don't have to do anything anymore. It's why i laugh when people predict China will invade Taiwan. No they won't. Why? Because they don't have to. As a reminder, One China is the official policy of the US government.
My problem is that empires don't die quietly. They die violently. And we're going to see a wave of fascism. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better.
What were the political commitments of the writers of the pre-WWI history you read? Could they have an incentive to characterize things this way?
You can also draw a comparison with the late imperial stage of other empires, most recently the British.
The British Empire actually reached its greatest territorial extent in the 1920s and 30s, but it was overextended, policymaking was becoming increasingly erratic and in hindsight we can see the writing was already on the wall