Something to recognize overall with this:
it can be, and in fact is, simultaneously true that the Kaiser has been unfairly blamed for things which were not his fault, AND that he actually did do all sorts of things which contributed to the war occurring.
It’s a bit like the fact that a marriage can fail BOTH because one partner didn’t work at showing proper care and respect for the other, AND that the other discarded all principles, and cheated on them. The marriage was doomed either way.
Russia didn’t HAVE to do anything. How was Serbia going to enforce any agreement?
Wherever he is, Nicky surely agrees now that he SHOULD have said, “Screw the Serbs.”
If this was true on the eve of WWI, then France should have had an aggressive plan in place to conquer Germany. Instead, their war plan was predicated on the likelihood that Germany would invade France, and that they could blunt the invasion and defeat it with a counterstrike into Germany - not reestablish a French empire in Europe.
There’s a new book out about commercial airline disasters and what causes them. According to the review I read, the author cites a chain of malfunctions and pilot errors cascading into disaster as common to such events.
And that’s what happened leading up to WWI. Stupid people doing stupid things in a setting that guaranteed a widespread and long-lasting conflict.
Kaiser Wilhelm II was not the only stupid and greedy individual involved, just the most influential one.*
Count Leopold Berchtold, Austria-Hungary’s foreign minister gets a lot of votes for the Jerk Prize as well.
Nicky never had enough brains or initiative to make such a sensible decision under pressure from influential members of Russian society and hangers-on. Russia was the Protector Of The Slavic People, and that was that.