alt Hacker Newsdo you mind qualifying this? it sounds like you mean dollar hegemony, which I might accept, but if you mean foreign policy in general, I can think of many invasions , financial crises, cold wars, lost prosperity for most of those Presidents.
do you mind qualifying this? it sounds like you mean dollar hegemony, which I might accept, but if you mean foreign policy in general, I can think of many invasions , financial crises, cold wars, lost prosperity for most of those Presidents.
I think we're talking less about the aspect of Bismarck where he won 3 big wars and lost none, and more about the part where he set up a delicate system that was maybe too complex for his successors to maintain, especially under idiosyncratic leaders. We're not talking about financial crises. Bismarck did not stop the Panic of 1873 (in fact, you could wave your hands and argue he indirectly caused it).
As far as "who set up the US empire, in all its complexity?", I'd argue for the 4 guys I named in my other comment, but your list might differ. And if you're just interested in the dollar system per se, I'd probably go with Harry Dexter White, who strangely enough turned out to be a Soviet spy.
Oh, and if you want a pretty clear analogy from Bismarck's system to earlier US monetary history: Benjamin Strong got the Federal Reserve System up and running and figured out a bunch of the right tricks, but he died in 1928 without getting his successors up to speed on how to run things. They failed miserably in next couple years. Bad timing!