21 ms·

I remember studying pre-WWI history, and particularly how carefully Bismarck arranged German foreign policy like he was the diplomatic equivalent of Bobby Fisch

I 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.

arbuge 9mo ago
Who would you say the Bismarck equivalent for the USA is/was?
- mullingitover 9mo ago
  I wouldn't put it on one person, it was basically everyone between Roosevelt and Obama. Not that any of them were exactly geniuses, but we've gone from mostly sober drivers to someone blowing a 0.5 BAC.
  - tonymet 9mo ago
    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.
    - arduanika 9mo ago
      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!
      - tonymet 9mo ago
        Your list and the one above (e.g. with General Marshall, etc) are more illustrative & aligned with developing US Hegemony than the 20th Century Presidents. It seems to me the US presidents have been drawing down hegemony assets since JFK. It's just that the USA was so dominant after WW2 that it took about a century for the structure to collapse. A better model than seeing Trump as a wrecking ball, is seeing him as a high stakes gambler, with middling skills -- in the same way that George W Bush made a big bet on the middle east and lost the chips.
- snikeris 9mo ago
  Joe Biden.
- arduanika 9mo ago
  JQ Adams, Elihu Root, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger.
- ragall 9mo ago
  What gave the US the power it's now throwing away was an array of successes that made the US an example of good governance for the entire world: New Deal, Bretton Woods agreeement, victory in WW2, Marshall Plan and NATO. There wasn't a single person in charge of that all, but I think 3 stand out: * Henry Morgenthau Jr.: secretary of Treasury during Roosevelt, one of the main designers of the New Deal, of financing the US war machine during WW2, and also one of the US negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference * George C. Marshall: chief of staff of the US Army, organized the victory in WW2, came up with the eponymous plan and carried it forward politically. secretary of State after the War * Dean Acheson: main designer of the Marshall Plan and of NATO, and one of the US negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference. secretary of State after Marshall
  - Yoric 9mo ago
    Yeah, the Marshall plan was a master stroke. Shame the US didn't manage to reproduce it in Irak.
mkoubaa 9mo ago
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?
- aerhardt 9mo ago
  Margaret MacMillan is a modern historian with a liberal world view and no ideological incentive to defend Bismarck, and in her phenomenal work The War that Ended Peace (2013) she largely supports this view.
- jyounker 9mo ago
  The summation aligns with everything I've ever read from anyone about Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm. Behind the Bastards has a pretty good couple of episodes on this little corner of history: https://podcasts.apple.com/ke/podcast/part-one-kaiser-wilhelm-the-saddest-warlord-in-history/id1373812661?i=1000457226901 https://podcasts.apple.com/ke/podcast/part-one-kaiser-wilhel...
ifwinterco 9mo ago
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
- mullingitover 9mo ago
  The British didn't really make unforced errors like Germany did, though. They mostly were forced into a fire sale situation as they were fighting for their lives. Even with everything they sold off, they were still within an inch of surrendering. The French story is similar. They may have been in a slow decline, but the war threw them off a cliff. It's hard to look at what the US is doing and not become extremely angry, because historically the dumb hubristic nationalism always leads to crushing misery. It's so utterly predictable, and yet we're forced to watch the idiocy play itself out again.
  - ifwinterco 9mo ago
    I agree but the difference between the French and the British is the French really didn't have a choice (they got physically invaded). You could make a very good case that for Britain entering into WW1 was a catastrophic and ultimately unnecessary decision. And you could make a (much more controversial but I think also true) case that entering into WW2 was also not necessary and ultimately fairly catastrophic. Yet the British elites chose to do both. Pride, hubris, stupidity, maybe well deserved, call it what you want, but in the end British power was given away cheaply. I think what the US is currently doing is foolish but as you say there's also a sort of inevitability about it. Edit: You could also add the Soviet Union to this, an even more recent example of the end of an empire. Towards the end during the Gorbachev era policymaking went from relatively "normal" (by Soviet standards) to extremely bizarre in a short space of time
    - Cold_Miserable 9mo ago
      Britain should have stayed neutral like Sweden and Switzerland instead of getting economically devastated.
jmyeet 9mo ago
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.
- prennert 9mo ago
  > 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. I think this exactly how the US administration _feels_. Alexandr Dugin proposed spheres of influence. Russia starts acting on those. China is getting more powerful. Its now or never.
  - jmyeet 9mo ago
    I'm an historical materialist. That means I don't believe religion, ethnicity or political philosophy ever drives international conflict. It's always, always, always material interests. Those other things are just an excuse, something to rile up the populace into supporting the government and dying on the front line. So some think Duginism and a Greater Russia is driving Putin's expanionist activity in Ukraine (including Crimea and the invasion in 2022). I don't see it that way. It's using the Russian diaspora as an excuse for expansion, similar to what Hitler did in Austria and the Sedetenland. But the interests are material. Russia does have a "legitimate" interest in not having a hostile Great Power on its borders. I include NATO as an extension of the US. I say "legitimate" in the sense that they're doing the exact same thing the US does. The US has the (ever-changing) Monroe Doctrine and almost started World War Three over Cuba (despite instigating the confrontation in Turkey). But NATO was never going to expand to include Ukraine. Bush and Biden both made offhand comments about it but countries like Germany would always veto Ukraine's membership because they don't want NATO on Russia's borders. And Putin knows this. So there's some historical revisionism going on to say that Putin invaded Ukraine because of NATO. I personally think he would've done it anyway. The real problem is that Russia wants a warm water port on the Black Sea and that's what Sevastopol is. Ukraine cut off the water and it's becoming increasingly expensive to maintain that holding so Russia has captured what's essentially a land bridge to Crimea and plans to hold on to it until the West gets bored. I believe that Putin arguably overplayed his hand by buying European silence on the matter with natural gas dependence. The US however spends a ton of money and military force and political will projecting power into, say, the Middle East. Is that in the US sphere of influence? No. The US is also a net energy exporter now so you can't even blame securing oil as an excuse for it. The US isn't operating in a deeply insecure fashion. Instead, they're simply extracting wealth from all over the world for the benefit of a handful of billionaires. I guess where the US is insecure is in that no system other than neoliberalism can be allowed to exist and prosper because it might cause the populace to revolt. The existence of the USSR actually forced to the US to give Americans something so they didn't revolt. This desire means that any quasi-socialist nation gets starved with sanctions and couped to maintain this illusion. And the US's big problem is they can't bully and starve China in this way.

arbuge 9mo ago

Who would you say the Bismarck equivalent for the USA is/was?

mullingitover 9mo ago
I wouldn't put it on one person, it was basically everyone between Roosevelt and Obama. Not that any of them were exactly geniuses, but we've gone from mostly sober drivers to someone blowing a 0.5 BAC.
- tonymet 9mo ago
  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.
  - arduanika 9mo ago
    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!
    - tonymet 9mo ago
      Your list and the one above (e.g. with General Marshall, etc) are more illustrative & aligned with developing US Hegemony than the 20th Century Presidents. It seems to me the US presidents have been drawing down hegemony assets since JFK. It's just that the USA was so dominant after WW2 that it took about a century for the structure to collapse. A better model than seeing Trump as a wrecking ball, is seeing him as a high stakes gambler, with middling skills -- in the same way that George W Bush made a big bet on the middle east and lost the chips.
snikeris 9mo ago
Joe Biden.
arduanika 9mo ago
JQ Adams, Elihu Root, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger.
ragall 9mo ago
What gave the US the power it's now throwing away was an array of successes that made the US an example of good governance for the entire world: New Deal, Bretton Woods agreeement, victory in WW2, Marshall Plan and NATO. There wasn't a single person in charge of that all, but I think 3 stand out: * Henry Morgenthau Jr.: secretary of Treasury during Roosevelt, one of the main designers of the New Deal, of financing the US war machine during WW2, and also one of the US negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference * George C. Marshall: chief of staff of the US Army, organized the victory in WW2, came up with the eponymous plan and carried it forward politically. secretary of State after the War * Dean Acheson: main designer of the Marshall Plan and of NATO, and one of the US negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference. secretary of State after Marshall
- Yoric 9mo ago
  Yeah, the Marshall plan was a master stroke. Shame the US didn't manage to reproduce it in Irak.

mkoubaa 9mo ago

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?

aerhardt 9mo ago
Margaret MacMillan is a modern historian with a liberal world view and no ideological incentive to defend Bismarck, and in her phenomenal work The War that Ended Peace (2013) she largely supports this view.
jyounker 9mo ago
The summation aligns with everything I've ever read from anyone about Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm. Behind the Bastards has a pretty good couple of episodes on this little corner of history: https://podcasts.apple.com/ke/podcast/part-one-kaiser-wilhelm-the-saddest-warlord-in-history/id1373812661?i=1000457226901 https://podcasts.apple.com/ke/podcast/part-one-kaiser-wilhel...

ifwinterco 9mo ago

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

mullingitover 9mo ago
The British didn't really make unforced errors like Germany did, though. They mostly were forced into a fire sale situation as they were fighting for their lives. Even with everything they sold off, they were still within an inch of surrendering. The French story is similar. They may have been in a slow decline, but the war threw them off a cliff. It's hard to look at what the US is doing and not become extremely angry, because historically the dumb hubristic nationalism always leads to crushing misery. It's so utterly predictable, and yet we're forced to watch the idiocy play itself out again.
- ifwinterco 9mo ago
  I agree but the difference between the French and the British is the French really didn't have a choice (they got physically invaded). You could make a very good case that for Britain entering into WW1 was a catastrophic and ultimately unnecessary decision. And you could make a (much more controversial but I think also true) case that entering into WW2 was also not necessary and ultimately fairly catastrophic. Yet the British elites chose to do both. Pride, hubris, stupidity, maybe well deserved, call it what you want, but in the end British power was given away cheaply. I think what the US is currently doing is foolish but as you say there's also a sort of inevitability about it. Edit: You could also add the Soviet Union to this, an even more recent example of the end of an empire. Towards the end during the Gorbachev era policymaking went from relatively "normal" (by Soviet standards) to extremely bizarre in a short space of time
  - Cold_Miserable 9mo ago
    Britain should have stayed neutral like Sweden and Switzerland instead of getting economically devastated.

jmyeet 9mo ago

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.

prennert 9mo ago
> 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. I think this exactly how the US administration _feels_. Alexandr Dugin proposed spheres of influence. Russia starts acting on those. China is getting more powerful. Its now or never.
- jmyeet 9mo ago
  I'm an historical materialist. That means I don't believe religion, ethnicity or political philosophy ever drives international conflict. It's always, always, always material interests. Those other things are just an excuse, something to rile up the populace into supporting the government and dying on the front line. So some think Duginism and a Greater Russia is driving Putin's expanionist activity in Ukraine (including Crimea and the invasion in 2022). I don't see it that way. It's using the Russian diaspora as an excuse for expansion, similar to what Hitler did in Austria and the Sedetenland. But the interests are material. Russia does have a "legitimate" interest in not having a hostile Great Power on its borders. I include NATO as an extension of the US. I say "legitimate" in the sense that they're doing the exact same thing the US does. The US has the (ever-changing) Monroe Doctrine and almost started World War Three over Cuba (despite instigating the confrontation in Turkey). But NATO was never going to expand to include Ukraine. Bush and Biden both made offhand comments about it but countries like Germany would always veto Ukraine's membership because they don't want NATO on Russia's borders. And Putin knows this. So there's some historical revisionism going on to say that Putin invaded Ukraine because of NATO. I personally think he would've done it anyway. The real problem is that Russia wants a warm water port on the Black Sea and that's what Sevastopol is. Ukraine cut off the water and it's becoming increasingly expensive to maintain that holding so Russia has captured what's essentially a land bridge to Crimea and plans to hold on to it until the West gets bored. I believe that Putin arguably overplayed his hand by buying European silence on the matter with natural gas dependence. The US however spends a ton of money and military force and political will projecting power into, say, the Middle East. Is that in the US sphere of influence? No. The US is also a net energy exporter now so you can't even blame securing oil as an excuse for it. The US isn't operating in a deeply insecure fashion. Instead, they're simply extracting wealth from all over the world for the benefit of a handful of billionaires. I guess where the US is insecure is in that no system other than neoliberalism can be allowed to exist and prosper because it might cause the populace to revolt. The existence of the USSR actually forced to the US to give Americans something so they didn't revolt. This desire means that any quasi-socialist nation gets starved with sanctions and couped to maintain this illusion. And the US's big problem is they can't bully and starve China in this way.