Bismarck, Germany, and Machiavelli's warning to nation builders
One of the great delights of reading Machiavelli is how prescient his comments are. For me, he is the epitome of the realistic realist: he is objective about human nature, but not unduly pessimistic, and we find so many "new" theories already expounded in his works: loss aversion theory, for instance, or the resource curse. Reading him gives us a new understand of current and past events, and a capacity to foresee, within reasonable proportions, future ones. Any politician or leader of nowadays can find much to learn from a careful reading of Machiavelli—not just his more famous The Prince , but especially, also, his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius , a masterly analysis of history with an eye to the present. And this leads me to this post's subject. Henry Kissinger, in his Diplomacy , tells us that the tragedy of Bismarck's life was that while he managed to unite Germany and make it strong—so much so that it was able to endure two world wars, naz...