[Leaning Right]

> If only the Kaiser hadn’t been a fool… <

The Kaiser dismissed Bismarck in 1890. And Bismarck died in 1898. Yet it would have been interesting to see if WW1 could have been avoided if Bismarck were still advising the Kaiser.

“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”

Otto von Bismarck (1888)

[BlueLancer]

I would guess that one could get a feel for Chancellor Bismarck's attitude to the Balkans by the following quote:

The starting point for our geopolitical analysis is the famous comment by Otto von Bismarck, the 19th century German chancellor at the time of the Congress of Berlin (1878), who dismissed the Balkans as "not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier".

[Menes]

By the way, William II didn’t dismiss Bismarck because he wanted another foreign policy- he wanted better laws for the poor.

Health insurance, assistance for the disabled and the unemployed were the Emperor’s „children“. He also was a great supporter of science - the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes (today Max Planck Institutes) were founded by his initiative, and so was the Kiel Canal and the Midland Canal.

He knew what potential benefit lay in good waterways, as well as in good scholars.