The reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II as King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany from 1888 to 1918 saw the meteoric rise of Germany as an economic and military power.

Utterly convinced of his right to rule, Wilhelm always overestimated his capacity for wise political judgment.

One hundred years ago this week, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany exchanged a series of telegrams to try to stop the rush to a war that neither of them wanted. They signed their notes “Nicky” and “Willy.”

Yet only three days after the tsar and kaiser’s initial exchange, Germany declared war on Russia, and World War I was underway.

The Donald Trump-Kaiser Wilhelm Parallels Are Getting Scary

Historian Thomas Nipperdey once described Wilhelm as “superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success — as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday.”

But lately I’ve been struck by the parallels between POTUS 45 and the last Hohenzollern emperor: Kaiser Wilhelm II. I’m not the first person to notice the similarities

An unnatural love for his royal mother was at the heart of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s hatred of Britain in the years before the First World War, according to experts who have uncovered new evidence of an incestuous obsession.

“An English doctor crippled my arm and an English doctor is killing my father!” 

Wilhelm was the last German emperor (kaiser) and king of Prussia, whose bellicose policies helped to bring about World War One.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was born in Potsdam, Germany, on January 27, 1859, the son of Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia (1831-88) and Princess Victoria (1840-1901), the oldest daughter of Queen Victoria of England (1819-1901).

The political event that shaped Wilhelm was the formation of the German Empire under the leadership of Prussia in 1871.

As someone who served five years in the United States Army, 14 months of that in combat, I've struggled over the past few years to understand Donald Trump's relationship to the military. Does this man love us, or does he hate us?

so good at the military, it will make your head spin,"

“What we can’t have is the same old politics of division that we have seen so many times before that dates back centuries,” Mr. Obama told a campaign rally for Philip D. Murphy in Newark. “Some of the politics we see now, we thought we put that to bed. That has folks looking 50 years back. It’s the 21st century, not the 19th century. Come on!”

But the sight of the two most recent presidents back on the public stage on the same day, however coincidental, reinforced the broader alarm among establishment leaders of both parties.

It turns out that North Korea isn’t just a nuclear threat. It’s also a cyberthreat, and in some ways, this may be more frightening.

All this now seems plausible.

“How can such an isolated, backward country have this capability?” asked a former British government official. “Well, how can such an isolated backward country have this nuclear ability?”

Don't back North Korea into a corner, Putin warns

Putin did not mention the U.S. specifically on Thursday, but warned of the growing possibility of conflict and pointed out that North Korea is a "sovereign country."

A series of missile and nuclear tests has rattled North Korea's neighbors. The U.S. has responded with sanctions. North Korea's foreign minister last month stated that Trump had "declared war" on his country and that Kim's regime would consider shooting down American bombers. The White House later described the notion that the U.S. had declared war "absurd."

Another day, another threat by North Korea to stage an "unimaginable" strike on the U.S. amid tensions over Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs.

"The U.S. is running amok by introducing under our nose the targets we have set as primary ones. The U.S. should expect it would face unimaginable strike at an unimaginable time," the North's Korean Central News Agency said Thursday. 

No one really knows all that much about North Korea's nuclear or conventional military capability or its strategic agenda. Are its nuclear missiles reliably lethal, are they as long-ranged and accurate as hyped, and are they under secure command and control?

North Korea: The knowns and unknowns

Beijing enjoys playing dumb from time to time as it unleashes North Korea to threaten the West and consume American time, money and military resources in Asia and the Pacific.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Pyongyang does not plan to hold any talks with Washington about its nuclear program, a senior North Korean diplomat said on Friday, declaring that possessing nuclear weapons was a matter of life and death for North Korea, the RIA news agency reported.

Tension has soared on the peninsula following a series of weapons tests by North Korea and a string of increasingly bellicose exchanges between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“We are convinced that its implementation will promote the lessening of military activity and tension on the Korean peninsula and the forming in Northeastern Asia of a system of equal and indivisible security,” he said.

Why inequality in America is worse than it is in China

In China, the top 1 percent earned 13 percent of personal income in 2015 — double their share in the 1980s. In the U.S., the top 1 percent earned 20 percent of income. That's also roughly double the level from the 1980s.

The proposal that America engage Russia to fight Islamic terrorism is beyond folly.

First, the proposal dismisses Russia as the overarching existential threat to our existence, both as a free democratic society and physically. For all its savagery, ISIS is not an existential threat, whether to the U.S. or to Europe.