In March 1890, Wilhelm dismissed longtime Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and assumed direct control over his nation's policies, embarking on a "New Course" to cement Germany's status as a leading world power. Over the course of his reign, the German colonial empire acquired new territories in China and the Pacific and became Europe's largest manufacturer. However, he often undermined such progress by making tactless and threatening statements towards other countries without first consulting his ministers. Likewise, his regime did much to alienate itself from other great powers by initiating a massive naval build-up, contesting French control of Morocco, and building a railway through Baghdad that challenged Britain's dominion in the Persian Gulf. By the second decade of the 20th century, Germany could rely only on significantly weaker nations such as Austria-Hungary and the declining Ottoman Empire as allies.Despite strengthening Germany's position as a great power by building a powerful navy as well as promoting scientific innovation within its borders, Kaiser Wilhelm's public pronouncements and erratic foreign policy greatly antagonized the international community and are considered by many to have contributed to the fall of the German Empire. In 1914, his diplomatic brinksmanship culminated in Germany's guarantee of military support to Austria-Hungary during the July Crisis which plunged all of Europe into World War I. A lax wartime leader, Wilhelm left virtually all decision-making regarding strategy and organization of the war effort to the German Supreme Army Command. By August 1916, this broad delegation of power gave rise to a de facto military dictatorship that dominated the country's policies for the rest of the conflict. Despite emerging victorious over Russia and obtaining significant territorial gains in Eastern Europe, Germany was forced to relinquish all its conquests after a decisive defeat on the Western Front in the autumn of 1918.
Historians have frequently stressed the role of Wilhelm's personality in shaping his reign. Thus, Thomas Nipperdey concludes he was:
...gifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern,—technology, industry, science—but at the same time 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—romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off, a juvenile cadet, who never took the tone of the officers' mess out of his voice, and brashly wanted to play the part of the supreme warlord, full of panicky fear of a monotonous life without any diversions, and yet aimless, pathological in his hatred against his English mother.
Historian David Fromkin states that Wilhelm had a love–hate relationship with Britain. According to Fromkin, "From the outset, the half-German side of him was at war with the half-English side. He was wildly jealous of the British, desiring to be British and to be better at being British than the British were, while at the same time hating them and resenting them because he never could be fully accepted by them".
The negative international consequences of Wilhelm's erratic personality: "He believed in force, and the 'survival of the fittest' in domestic as well as foreign politics ... William was not lacking in intelligence, but he did lack stability, disguising his deep insecurities by swagger and tough talk. He frequently fell into depressions and hysterics ... William's personal instability was reflected in vacillations of policy. His actions, at home as well as abroad, lacked guidance, and therefore often bewildered or infuriated public opinion. He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives, as had been the case with Bismarck, as with asserting his will. This trait in the ruler of the leading Continental power was one of the main causes of the uneasiness prevailing in Europe at the turn-of-the-century".
British public opinion had been quite favorable towards Wilhelm in his first twelve years on the throne, but it turned sour in the late 1890s. During the First World War, he became the central target of British anti-German propaganda and the personification of a hated enemy.
Wilhelm died of a pulmonary embolism in Doorn, Netherlands, on 4 June 1941, at the age of 82, just weeks before the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite his personal resentment and animosity toward the monarchy, Hitler wanted to bring the Kaiser's body back to Berlin for a state funeral, as Hitler felt that such a funeral, with himself acting in the role of heir apparent to the throne, would be useful to exploit for propaganda. However, Wilhelm's orders that his body was not to return to Germany unless the monarchy was first restored were then revealed and were grudgingly respected. The Nazi occupation authorities arranged for a small military funeral, with a few hundred people present. However, Kaiser Wilhelm's insistence that the swastika and Nazi Party regalia not be displayed at his funeral was ignored, as is seen in the photographs of the funeral taken by a Dutch photographer.
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