From what I figure if he had kept up Bismark's good relations with Britain and not tried a huge building contest he might have prevented Britain from abandoning its "Splendid Isolation", and picking an alliance with FRANCE of all countries
Of course knowing Kaiser Wilhelm that is extraordinarily unlikely, but I fell this is a viable possibility if a rather slim one.
I also forgot to put in my usual weasel words there
"Splendid Isolation" was abandoned in response to French, Russian, American, and Japanese threat more than anything else, and the British response to all was to co-opt the parties that were threatening them and unite them against a lesser threat. Germany's efforts at
Weltpolitik were actually part of a clumsy effort to get the British to do the same for them; it didn't work, because no matter how big the High Seas Fleet was and no matter how many
Schütztruppen the Germans stationed overseas, Germany never posed an existential danger to the British Empire.
The British, for all their talk of "balance of power", knew that forming a bloc against their
strongest potential opponents was lunacy. Why would you want to fight on relatively even terms with anybody? (Invariably, "balance of power" is actually a cover for "whatever foreign policy we feel like following". It's a term without any actual meaning; nobody actually agrees on what a "balance" constitutes anyway.) Best to make any potential fight as unfair as it possibly can be. Where the British screwed up was in failing to realize that the fight wasn't as unfair as they thought it would be.
It would not have mattered if the Germans had not built a High Seas Fleet (a decision which, by the way, wasn't simply due to the "kaiser being stupid" or whatever) because Germany was still the great enemy of France and Russia, and to keep France and Russia focused on Europe instead of Africa and Central Asia, the British had to align with them against Germany. Besides, let's take a look at what happened when Germany deliberately took foreign policy actions that were designed to conciliate the British:
During the Boer War, the Germans ostentatiously decided to not support the Boers despite cultural ties and an excellent chance for messing with the British empire in southern Africa. Instead, Germany "let itself be bought off" (wink wink) with an agreement that divided the Portuguese colonies. The kaiser repeatedly mentioned this to the British ambassador and various dignitaries, along with his efforts to suppress anti-British feeling in the German press. If these efforts had an effect in British government circles, it was that Germany was increasingly viewed with disdain, attempting to curry favor.
In both 1906 and 1911, legitimate German claims in Morocco, enforced by treaties, were dropped, sometimes in favor of nominal colonial territorial concessions. Germany made a stand and didn't stick to it, allowing Britain and, most importantly, Britain's ally France to rewrite the treaties and expand France's colonial empire. This merely increased Anglo-French annoyance with Germany; some historians argue that the Algeciras conference in particular was where the entente itself transformed into an anti-German accord instead of a mere colonial agreement.
In 1912 and 1913, Germany's ally Austria saw its security gravely threatened by the enlargement of Serbia at the expense of the Ottoman Empire (a key German trading partner) and then Bulgaria (Austria's ideal ally). Both times, Austria prepared to mobilize against Serbia; both times, the Germans refused to support Austria in order to maintain their detente with Russia and France, and the Austrians angrily backed down. (This played a key role in Austria's July 1914 decision to go to war whether Germany supported Austria or not, something that makes the so-called "blank check" utterly irrelevant.) Both times, Russia did not respond with any sort of warm relations with Germany; the Russians instead pushed further, trying to rebuild a Balkan alliance in 1914 whose enemy could only have been Austria.
Basically, Germany suffered setbacks regardless of whether the German government's actions were conciliatory to the entente powers or confrontational to them. This is mostly because the international system, such as it was, was stacked against Germany and Austria-Hungary. It doesn't mean that the Central Powers were "innocent" of starting the First World War or anything, or that German policy was somehow less objectionable than anybody else's (it was
equally as objectionable as everybody else's), but it does explain their actions; in 1914, the Austrians and Germans finally recognized that playing by the rules screwed them over, so they simply broke the rules.
Realistically, avoiding such a disastrous setup probably was in the hands of Russia, not Germany. Had the Germans and Russians managed to work out their differences and keep some semblance of the Three Emperors' League alive, both Germany and Austria would be under significantly less pressure and certainly would not have had to take the actions that they eventually did. Of course, France and Britain would be in the hot seat if that occurred.
As to the weasel words, well, fair point.
