A belated response:
Yes, WW1 (and German colonies) also wouldn't have happened without Wilhelm II, who was the worst kind of person to lead a country: narcissistic, insecure, unintelligent, unimaginative, vindictive and easy to anger. A lot like Trump, actually.
But history rarely is caused by a single factor. Even though Germany was a monarchy, Wilhelm II couldn't just start wars without support. He was just one man and if he hadn't been useful to certain interest groups, then he would have ended up floating next to Ludwig II in Lake Starnberg.
What do you think Wilhelm II wanting a "place under the sun" for Germany was if not "Lebensraum"?
When
Friedrich Ratzel came back from America and wrote about his travels, his ideas were well received and provided the intellectual framework for a political coalition of businesspeople, aristocrats and financiers who were advocating for the establishment of German colonies. One of their main arguments was that Germany needed colonies for its "excess population" that would otherwise be lost to places like America. So they looked at what was going on with those German communities in the USA and thought "Hmm, what if we try to recreate that in Africa?".
In 1882, the German Colonial Association was founded in Frankfurt, followed by the Society for German Colonization in 1884 (founded in Berlin). Those two organizations merged in 1887 to form the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft / DKG).
Those organizations' role in Germany was similar to right-wing think tanks in the USA. Neocons or the Heritage Foundation. For starters, they obtained an imperial charter to establish a German colony in East Africa at the end of the Berlin Conference in 1885.
The DKG wasn't just "some rightist political elements": it had tens of thousands of members, highly influential leaders of businesses and the industry - and of course Friedrich Ratzel himself. If Wilhelm II's transgressions had just consisted of bringing his marching band to his aunt's boat parties, he would have been remembered as a weird but harmless monarch. But the influence of that organization put Germany on a direct collision course with the already established colonial powers that led directly to WW1.
Some members and beneficiaries of the DKG would later become enthusiastic Nazis: one of the officers in charge of carrying out the genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia (where Germans learned how to build concentration camps) was an aristocrat named Franz Ritter von Epp. If that name sounds familiar, it's because after WW1, he comandeered the "Freikorps Epp": a right-wing militia that brutally squashed a socialist revolution in Bavaria and would become a point of origin for the Nazi Party. Two of his direct subordinates were Ernst Röhm and Rudol Hess, Epp himself was the initial financier of the DAP, the party that would later be renamed into NSDAP. When the DKG was absorbed by the Reich Colonial League (Reichskolonialbund / RKB) in Nazi Germany, it was led by Epp.
All of that goes back to this:
"The natives must be destroyed, as seen in America, whether by bullet or via missionary work with brandy." – Lothar von Trotha: Diary entry, July 7, 1904
That's the man who built the first German-run concentration camps.
America's influence on this typically gets ignored, but if a wet poodle like JD Vance wants to present the USA as the country that single-handedly saved Western civilization, then it's got to pick up the slack on this as well.
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