In Germany too there was astonishment. For the Reich to be offering Texas and Arizona to Mexican ‘brigands’ whilst simultaneously angling for an alliance with Japan, the leading German industrialist Walther Rathenau wrote to General Hans von Seeckt, was ‘too sad even to laugh about’.65 But however hallucinogenic these associations may have appeared, the bizarre German scheme to seize the military initiative in the western hemisphere was the logical extension of Berlin’s idée fixe that America was already committed to the Entente and that a declaration of war was under any circumstances
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