Fritz Stern
The United States, with its claims of exceptionalism, is usually thought of as free of historical analogies. But comparisons with the fate of earlier empires are becoming more common. I have recently been struck by an analogy from German history: the disaster of German leadership during World War I, epitomised by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wilhelm assumed the throne in 1888 at age 29, his liberal father having reigned for 88 days before succumbing to throat cancer. His grandfather, Wilhelm I, had presided over Prussia's military victories, which enabled Bismarck to create the unified Reich in 1871. Within two years, Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck. Wilhelm II became the leader of a country on the cusp of European mastery. By the 1890s, Germany was the strongest power on the continent. But power generates opposition, and Germany's alarmed neighbours began to form defensive alliances.
Wilhelm flaunted his absolute power, believing it to be divinely ordained. He was contemptuous of parliament, whose circumscribed powers were set forth in a constitution that he boasted of never having read. He was intelligent, impressed by technological progress, but untutored and impulsive; he reveled in the trappings of power and delighted in uniforms. His ostentation and extravagance were deeply un-Prussian.
He was given to bombastic speeches, once warning newly sworn-in recruits that, if he so ordered, they would have to shoot their parents. He gave astounding orders to soldiers departing to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China: they should awaken fear as had the Huns of yore. He detested liberal critics. And he spoke disparagingly of foreign nations, especially Great Britain. Some of this had to do with his ambivalent anglophobia and his distrust of his mother, Queen Victoria's daughter.
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