Bismarck gets a bad rap from most historians. Yeah, the Iron Chancellor had a way of pissing off his contemporary liberals – and I would have been one of them. “The issues of the day will not be decided at the ballot box, they will be decided with blood and iron” is no way to soothe the soul of a (small-d) democratic (small-r) republican.

Yeah, he was the power behind the throne that forged the Second German Reich. Sure, he created the modern welfare state in a blatant effort to buy off progressives. And, of course, he was dismissive of representative government and a big fan of the divine right of kings.

Total bastard, right?

Wrong.

Bismarck, after working hard to make his king an emperor, worked even harder to present that Empire as satiated. He wanted no new territories added to the Reich, and (with the exception of a brief – and mostly fruitless – foray in the late 1870s) eschewed Germany ever seeking its “place in the sun” by obtaining foreign colonies. Bismarck negotiated solid treaties of friendship and trade with Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. He built no fleet to challenge Britain, and regarding France, he sought only to ensure that Paris couldn’t form a ring of alliances surrounding Germany.

When Emperor Frederick Wilhelm II ascended the throne in 1890, with dreams of world conquest in his rotten little brain, it still took him twenty years to undo Bismarck’s good works.

So it is with great pleasure that I link you to this NYT op-ed column detailing the lessons President Bush could learn from Otto von Bismarck.

The only problem is, author Josee Joffe forgets that Bismarck’s most important aphorism (“In a world of five powers, always be among three”) doesn’t apply to the world’s sole hyperpower.