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 disappears. The Europeans who learned in school about regressive dictators obsessed with being a Kaiser aren’t subtle about what they think of Vance and Trump.
A new YouGov poll released Feb. 6 found that favorable views of the U.S. among Western European nations have fallen sharply since Trump’s return to office, following the President’s aggressive attempts to annex Greenland, his Administration’s ongoing trade war with most of its European allies, and a years-long divide over the future of NATO and European security.
Perhaps predictably, the biggest impact was seen in Denmark. Some 84% of Danes now hold an unfavourable view of the U.S., compared with an average of 36% during former President Joe Biden’s term. Only 26% of Danes view the U.S. as an ally or friendly nation, compared with 80% in July 2023.
The same trend is seen across Western Europe, in countries that were once considered U.S. allies. In Spain, only 39% of people see the U.S. as a friend or ally today, down from 73% in 2023. In Germany, the number is 41%, down from 70%; in Britain, 46%, down from 69%; in France, 53%, down from 64%; and in Italy, 52%, down from 61%.
A closer look at the data shows that Europeans’ views of the United States are strongly influenced by their views of Trump. A January poll by YouGov found that, in Britain, 81% of people held an unfavorable opinion of President Trump; in France, 75%; in Germany, 84%; and in Denmark, 94%.
If you read that right, Canada and the EU are orienting around the issues faced by the Danes. Unilaterally bullying Greenland has dramatically weakened America, while strengthening a Canadian-European alliance. Add strengthened ties to China and the American bluster can only become weaker and weaker.