Editing The World Wars (section)

===Additional Factors===
Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm was first ''and'' second cousins with Tsar Nicholas of Russia and first cousins with the Tsarina, the King of England, and the queens of Norway, Spain, and Romania, and they all got along about as well as your average pack of siblings.

Another was that when the war started, a [[That Guy|certain someone]] called the United States took a [[A Game of Pretend |totally neutral and not blatantly pro-Entente]] stance by shipping vast amounts of food and materiel to Britain and funding the war via loans to the Entente powers. The massive debt that Britain and France rang up made Wall Street and Washington more and more interested in making sure their investment could be paid back. This along other things would be one of the deciding factors in American involvement in the First World War. 

The Franco-Prussian War was also a sore spot for France, who were not only afraid of German encroachment, but determined to get revenge for what they had done to them. This not only contributed to France's bloody-minded determination not to quit fighting, but also influenced the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

As far as significant developments, probably one of the biggest was Wilhelm II sacking Otto von Bismarck for a yes-man. Unlike Wilhelm, Bismarck was smart enough to understand that Germany's rise was a substantial shake-up of the existing European order, and had spent years doing his best to establish Germany's strength and prestige without causing alarm to the other powers. The first Kaiser, Wilhelm I. understood this, as did his son Friedrich III. (who died 90 days into office from cancer), but Wilhelm II wanted to prove his country was better (or more to the point, he wanted to prove that ''he'' was better, as he had longstanding insecurity due to a birth defect in his left arm - a big drawback in an overtly militarized society where physical prowess was the gold standard of manliness). So he sacked probably the smartest man in the entire goddamn government because he wasn't retarded enough to create a [[Horus Heresy|massive war that would fuck everyone over.]] Although there is a point to be made that Bismarck isolated himself in interior politics, as much of his efforts to keep the country stable consisted of suppressing the quickly growing movement of Socialists and alienating the otherwise staunchly conservative Catholics and in both efforts, he failed miserably (The culture war against the Catholics drew the ire of the Pope and the repressions against the workers movement and the Social Democratic Party SPD saw their share of votes increase to the point that they became the largest political party in the Empire by 1913)