Wilhelm’s attitudes toward England resembled those of certain anti-British Americans, and it was significant that he usually got along better with Americans, despite their deplorable breeziness and familiarity, and their misguided ideas about democracy, than he did with British aristocrats. After the brush with President Theodore Roosevelt over some German muscle-flexing off the Venezuelan coast in 1903, the Kaiser developed a warm admiration for the wielder of the Big Stick, about whom he later said, “Of all the men I’ve known he showed the strongest moral courage.”
