Canada plants a flag in Greenland is the headline. It’s no surprise.

Kaiser Wilhelm II didn’t lose because Germany was weak. He lost because he made Germany’s strength everyone else’s problem.

Trump today is making the mistakes of Germany’s Kaiser, across multiple fronts simultaneously: tariff threats against Canada, the EU, and China; territorial threats against Greenland and Panama; security extortion of NATO allies.

Each one individually might be manageable. Together, they’re practically a blueprint for “here’s why you all need to coordinate against us.”

The specific parallel is the shift from transactional diplomacy to dominance signaling. Bismarck understood that Germany’s power depended on preventing coalitions from forming against it. Wilhelm thought Germany’s power meant it could demand what it wanted from everyone at once.

When Wilhelm inherited Bismarck’s carefully constructed alliance system, it was designed to keep France isolated and maintain Germany’s position through balanced relationships. He systematically destroyed it through bluster, naval threats, and personal insecurity. The result was that France, Russia, and Britain, who had every reason to distrust each other, found common cause against the one actor threatening all of them simultaneously.

The Moroccan Crises are almost a template, with aggressive moves designed to demonstrate strength that instead demonstrated to Britain and France that they needed each other to pound the German bully.

And the economic dimension may be even more consequential than the military one was in 1914. The US dollar’s reserve currency status, American tech dominance, supply chain dependencies all rest on trust relationships that coercive diplomacy erodes. Once allies start seriously building alternative structures, those don’t just disappear when the bully backs down.