The Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm II

Wilhelm believed he'd be able to arrange peace when it was necessary at basically any point by just working things out one-on-one with his royal cousins. He noted that mere democracies could never make a peace conference work because war was a royal sport to be indulged in by hereditary monarchs and concluded at their will. And this is not how things worked out. The World War I was instantly, no, no. Like a quarter of a million Germans die in the first week of fighting. It's like hundreds of thousands of people are dead as soon as the fighting starts. As the situation grows more serious, the Kaiser is very quickly sidelined by his generals. By the end of