I am quoting from statements from the historical record made by politicians at the time - prior to WWI !
They and many others were convinced that a continental European war was impossible because of interconnected trade. I think England was one of Germany's largest if not the largest trading partner.
My ‘rule-of-thumb’ when everyone particularly the “opinion makers” are convinced something won't happen, look for it to happen !
Smug certainty is always an undoing !
It isn’t ‘smug’ to think a >$15T GDP country with a HUGE portion of their outlays going to China isn’t a reasonable comparison to a losing Germany of over 100 years ago... you lose however you look at it. Bad analogy and most definitely outdated, frankly.
there is absolutely zero comparison between pre WWI Europe’s commercial inter-relationships to the reality of today’s economy and nuclear deterrents.
It’s a false analogy
The combatants in Europe in 1915 did not have the ability to completely destroy their enemies. They had the ability to capture land of varying degrees of size — but Germany could not destroy France, England and France could not destroy Germany, and so forth
In this case, it is completely within the capabilities of The USA, Russia, England, France, and China to totally render any one of the others a completely non-functional (and probably non-existent) nation and economy through nuclear weapons
and in the case of the US and Russia and to a lesser extent China, at least two of these 3 have the capability to destroy any 1 of the other 4 major nuclear powers and then have plenty of weapons left over to destroy all of the remaining major nuke powers — and on a completely insane day, destroy the rest of the world.
So there is zero comparison in terms of inter-locked commerce.
The concerns this time are not the loss of a crucial trading partner as was the case in WWI.
The concern today is the brutal reality of a nuclear exchange.