Germany must strike to “defeat the enemy while we still stand a chance of victory,” the chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, declared in 1914, even if that meant “provoking a war in the near future.” 4 When a diplomatic crisis broke upon Europe that summer, the kaiser’s government did just that—making the decisions and taking the risks that helped turn the assassination of an Austrian prince into the global conflagration known as World War I. If Germany’s rise had given it the wherewithal to destroy the balance of power, its impending decline drove the aggressive gamble that plunged
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