Otto von Bismarck may well have been the most consequential statesman of the 19th century. He led his native Prussia through three triumphant wars. And his victories forged Germany into a unified state. He then piloted that state for nearly two more decades, an era of peace and growing wealth. The shocks of the 20th century badly battered this legacy. But much of it survives. And the virtuosity of his statecraft still commands great respect. 

Having aspired, at one time, to become a historian, I have often wondered about how Bismarck pulled it all off. Indeed, I sometimes still do, especially around the date of his birth, April 1. This year, though, such musing stirs some very uneasy thoughts. Bismarck took his country from being by far the weakest of the great powers to being, at least for a time, the strongest of them. 

In contrast, the United States has quickly fallen from its post-Cold War zenith as a near global hegemon. It appears today to be a declining power hard pressed to parry the thrusts of its two great power rivals. Worse, both of those rivals are now united in their resolve to curb U.S. world power. This turn of events begs an obvious question. Might some modern version of Bismarck’s Realpolitik do a better job of protecting vital U.S. interests than are the practices of our own foreign policy elite?

Throughout the post-Cold War era, save only for the Trump years, a bipartisan elite consensus has steered U.S. foreign policy. With Trump out of office, the old elite again dominates the conduct of affairs. It comprises two schools of thought that hold nearly identical core beliefs. One is that of the progressive left. The other that of the neoconservative right.

In this essay, I suggest that this current elite foreign policy consensus differs from Bismarck’s practice in at least three major ways. Each of the next three sections explores one of those main points of contrast between U.S. foreign policy and Bismarck’s. And a fourth section very briefly sums up the reasons for suspecting that Bismarck’s approach might be superior. 

Dogmatism or empiricism

Perhaps the most basic distinction between the methods of the U.S. elite and those of the Iron Chancellor is one of cognitive style. U.S. policymakers seem rarely to question certain key principles. Bismarck’s mode of thought was far more pragmatic, skeptical, and empirical. 

To be more specific, the current U.S. foreign policy consensus is premised on three major theses – all of them of doubtful merit. U.S. policy tacitly assumes, for instance, that world history is trending ineluctably toward a near universal triumph of Western-style human rights. It is a nice thought, but the facts do not bear it out. Only about 30 of the 200-plus states in the world are liberal democracies. They comprise only about 15 percent of the globe’s people. If those numbers have grown at all in recent decades, it has not been by much. Moreover, most of today’s autocracies lack the legal structures, social rules, and norms that ground advanced democracies; hence, regime change is largely beyond their reach. 

Second, U.S. progressives and neocons both tend to assume that the spread of democratic regimes would promote world peace. However, many leading scholars object that World War I, the War Between the States, and the War of 1812 all look like instances in which democracies did go to war with each other. The theory’s defenders respond that the states involved in these instances were not ‘real’ democracies. The prospects for reaching scholarly consensus seem dim. Either way, so disputed a theory seems shaky ground, indeed, as a basis for the security policy of a great power. 

Third, the U.S. foreign policy elite places great trust in the worth of a so-called rules-based international order. Transnational rules, though, do not enforce themselves. When they are enforced at all, specific states do the work and bear the costs. In the Cold War and the early post-Cold War eras, when U.S. relative power was high, Washington (sometimes with a few of its allies) often shouldered the costs of enforcing international norms and rules. As U.S. relative power has declined, though, fewer states defer to Washington’s preferences. The task of enforcing global rules becomes more costly. As U.S. resources are stretched thinner, it becomes clearer that the so-called rules-based order depends, in fact, on U.S. power.    

Bismarck, a political empiricist, if ever there was one, had little use for the lack of rigor that undergirds these U.S. assumptions. He was, instead, a keen student and analyst of both history and current events. And as it happened, the events of his time tended to immunize him from some of the delusions that U.S. elites find so appealing. Of these defining events, the one that stands out the most is the abject failure of the German Rebellions of 1848-49. A clearer proof of the futility of abstract principles unsupported by power would be hard to imagine. Many German liberals were at first reluctant to accept this harsh lesson – not so Bismarck.  

It is also a sure thing that Bismarck never inferred that the spread of democracy would lead to peace. He was born only months before the Battle of Waterloo had finally ended the quarter century of war that the French Revolution had started. Most members of the Prussian elite assumed that popularly elected leaders were apt not to avoid wars, but to start them. That after all, had been the record of every French leader from Brissot to Napoleon I. Indeed, Bismarck, by insisting that Prussia should treat Napoleon III as a legitimate monarch, lost the friendship and support of his first political patrons. 

Nor would the times have persuaded Bismarck about the power and goodness of transnational regimes. Some current scholars laud the Vienna System that prevailed in the wake of the Napoleonic wars as a precursor of the so-called rules-based world order. But the Vienna System’s frequent great power summit meetings had soon petered out. And the Crimean War of 1853-56 definitively ended the great power accord that had been the system’s power source. In any case, from the very start of Bismarck’s career in politics he had already grasped that outcomes depended more on the balance of power than on any set of transnational rules. 

Ultimately, though, what is most important is that Bismarck learned the right lessons from these events. The process required study. But even more important it required the strength of mind to discard comforting dogma and sentiment. 

Serving ideology or mastering it

Washington’s foreign policy elite has made U.S. world power the servant of quixotic ideals like promoting universal human rights or the liberal world order. Bismarck’s priorities were the opposite. He sought to make ideology serve the security and wealth of Prussia – not the other way around.

Nowhere is the U.S. elite’s misuse of resources more glaring than in its seemingly endless regime-change wars. All of them have been costly. None has done any real good for U.S. security. In Afghanistan, Washington turned what should have been a successful butcher-and-bolt punitive expedition into the hopeless task of nation-building. In Iraq, it ousted Saddam at the expense of strengthening the far more dangerous foe in Teheran. In Libya, it converted a dictatorship into violent anarchy. World oil prices spiked, and a highly disruptive surge of immigrants flooded the EU.

Ideology’s hold over U.S. foreign policy is also evident in its effects on alliances. NATO, for instance, is supposed to be a pillar of the liberal world order. This status has helped to insulate it from valid criticism. The result is that the European allies, most notably Germany, have been allowed to free ride on U.S. defense efforts. Therefore, when a potential threat arises, U.S. resources become unavailable for use against the far greater threat to U.S. interests that China poses.  

The U.S. elite also has a penchant for bullying its allies to adopt all of the so-called human rights that it thinks that they should. The Saudis are a troubling case in point. Plainly, a cultural chasm lies between the Saudi Kingdom and America. It has to complicate the task of maintaining an alliance. Nonetheless, the two states share common interests on a number of points that are of vital interest to both of them. Over time, the Saudis became increasingly effective allies in fighting Islamic terrorists. They and the other Gulf kingdoms have spent vast sums buying U.S. arms and they have provided useful bases for U.S. armed forces. Above all, the Saudis (as well as the Emiratis) have, until the signs of impending U.S. retreat from the Gulf, staunchly opposed Teheran’s bid for hegemony in the Persian Gulf.

Nonetheless, both Obama and Biden have openly scorned these states over their domestic regimes. Biden withdrew the Patriot batteries that were protecting Saudi oil installations from Houthi missile attacks. He released a CIA report accusing the Crown Prince of complicity in the Khashoggi murder. He removed the Houthis from the U.S. Terror list, and may soon do the same for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. For over a year, Biden refused even to speak to the Crown Prince (the de facto ruler). When he finally did try to call, it was to plead for the Saudis to pump more oil to replace Russian exports. (The Crown Prince refused the call.) U.S. policy conveys an image that is mainly one of bumbling impotence.  

Bismarck’s handling of ideology was, to say the least, far more adroit than Washington’s. In essence, he deeply distrusted all ideologies. The Chancellor took great care to manage public opinion. And in doing so he often used nationalism to good effect. Most notably in 1871, he used a tide of national sentiment to pressure the South German rulers to join the new, Prussian-dominated Reich. Thereafter, nationalism remained the mainstay of the Reich’s legitimacy.

Bismarck was as willing to exploit the nationalism of other peoples as he was to use that of the Germans. His support for the centrifugal forces of Italian and Magyar nationalism was a potent weapon with which to pressure the Hapsburgs to concede defeat in the Seven Weeks War of 1866. And the threat of it may also have helped to keep them neutral in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. 

Plainly, the Chancellor perceived nationalism’s immense power as a political force. He rightly regarded it as a stronger force than liberalism. Many German liberals failed at first to grasp this principle. Eventually, many did – under Bismarck’s tutelage. (It is a lesson that U.S. foreign policy elites are still struggling to fully absorb.) 

Yet, for all of the use that the Chancellor made of nationalism, he, himself, remained more loyal to the Prussian state than to the civic creed of German nationalism. That latter doctrine, for instance, in its purest form prescribed trying to include Austria’s German-speakers in a new Reich. Bismarck would have none of it. In 1866, attempting anything of the kind would have triggered French intervention to support Austria. Furthermore, adding the Austrian Germans would have made the state too big for Prussia to dominate it. Unlike U.S. leaders, Bismarck preferred building a state in the real world to pursuing an illusory ideal.

Knowing when to stop

How very different is the U.S. approach. U.S. leaders frequently feel obliged to push their goals far beyond the bounds of prudence. Time and again, U.S. foreign policy has pushed matters to the point of armed conflict where no vital U.S. interest was involved. The already discussed endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are clearly prime examples. They may, however, not prove to be the most harmful ones. 

The effort to extend NATO deep into Russia’s historic sphere of influence may all too well turn out to be more harmful still. States often lash out when their elites, or parts of them feel, that they have been wrongly denied their legitimate privileges as great powers. In the case of Ukraine, Moscow had paid a high price in blood and resources to retain control of Ukraine in both of the 20th Century world wars. It is a history that invests the territory with great symbolic significance. That the U.S.-engineered anti-Russian Kyiv coup of 2014 triggered a strong reaction in Moscow should have surprised no one. But since then, the level of conflict between Russia and Ukraine has spiraled upward. 

In provoking this conflict in Ukraine, Obama was inviting a conflict where Moscow had interests that it regarded as major. Washington, though, had little at stake that was of strategic value. And Moscow could bring force to bear on the conflict more easily than Washington. Moscow’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 should have driven both points home even to those in Washington and Kyiv who were reluctant to admit them. 

For the United States, the effect of threatening to add Ukraine to NATO is to drive Moscow into Beijing’s arms. Washington needs Moscow as an ally or at least a neutral in its coming power struggle with Beijing. Compared to that imperative no U.S. interest in Ukraine amounts to much. In fact, Ukraine’s joining NATO would weaken the alliance not strengthen it. And Germany as well as other member states would for that very reason, veto the idea. Berlin plainly has no intention of risking war with Russia to protect Ukraine’s abstract right to be considered for NATO membership. Nor is Washington under any strategic imperative to oppose autonomy for the Russian-speakers of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Bismarck was notably more reluctant than Washington is to pushing peripheral conflicts to extremes. His wariness was most on display in 1866 in the fierce debates about how to end the Seven Weeks War. Bismarck insisted that Prussia must accept a moderate peace that would forestall French intervention and make it possible in the future to reconcile with the Hapsburgs. The King and the General Staff were fiercely opposed. And before he prevailed Bismarck’s power was tested to its limits.

Moreover, after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck described himself as having become, “a fanatical friend of peace.” And he later described Germany as “a satiated power.” For the remainder of his tenure in office, Germany never again went to war. Instead, Bismarck personally played the honest broker in a number of conferences that helped keep a lid on dangerous Balkan conflicts. Meanwhile, Germany avoided becoming involved in that troublesome region. As he put it, “The Balkans are not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”

One case, though, seems to deviate from this this pattern of restraint. In the Treaty of Versailles ending the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck annexed Alsace-Lorraine from France. Many historians claim that this decision ensured that virulence of French revanchism that did so much to bring on World War I. His judgment was that defeat in war would injure France’s national pride badly enough to make another war quite possible. In that case, he reasoned, the two provinces would represent a useful glacis. (Whether he was right or not is a moot point.) But the Chancellor’s judgment was a reasonable one in light of the long record of prior conflict between the two countries that already existed,.

Lessons from history?

Bismarck’s methods succeeded largely because they were so well adapted to his own time and place. Prussia’s legal structures, culture, and strategic milieu all differ markedly from those of the post-Cold War United States. For all of that, there are also significant parallels. Most importantly, both states exist within multi-polar state systems. 

In the present, as in Bismarck’s time, the conduct of foreign affairs demands empiricism, not dogmatism. Ideology should be a tool of statecraft, not its master. And a statesman needs an intuitive sense of when to stop. On each these points, Washington might learn something of value from Otto von Bismarck.