So it would have been better for the Kaiser’s Second Reich to dominate Europe and even the Americas in the early part of the last century?
Since when did the Kaiser care about the Americas? The “Zimmerman Note” was more an attempt to keep the US neutral, rather than a signal of German intentions to dominate the Americas. They weren’t stupid.
The City of Kitchener, Ontario was previously named Berlin. It was changed in 1916 by a referendum of local citizens. Canada had internment camps for immigrants from Germany, Ukraine and Austria-Hungary. We were in the war early and followed whatever Britain decided. Surprising that America went to the extent of internments given that Germany had no territorial designs on the US.
“So it would have been better for the Kaiser’s Second Reich to dominate Europe and even the Americas in the early part of the last century?”
I really don’t know.
The war was so complex all I’ve settled on was that it ended poorly and set the stage for the rise of Hitler (piss be upon him) and WWII.
That argument has been made at various times. It is not completely outlandish. It was not a matter of dominating Europe nor America; those efforts came about from the relentless escalation of the war as a result of the rats nest of interlocking treaties that were in place at the time. It’s hard to argue that a German crackdown on Serbia as a result of the assassination, even if it might have been brutal, would have been more distasteful than the whole of WWI and the eventual outbreak of WW2.
Germany was the only one of the initially involved great powers to enter WWI with no war aims.