After a series of brutal and costly colonial wars in German Africa and legislative impasses in the Reichstag, Chancellor Bülow called new elections in 1906 to forge a stable legislative bloc of liberal and conservative parties. This chapter analyzes how Schmoller, Sering, and the other fleet professors mobilized for this election campaign to support the colonial reform program of the new Colonial Director Bernhard Dernburg as a new prong of “World Policy.” This campaign generated much new imperialist propaganda that would have a lasting impact in Germany. As the colonial crisis subsided, the Baghdad railroad faced new financial and political challenges that Karl Helfferich was called to surmount. Formal professor exchanges between the United States and Germany were initiated to help improve deteriorating relations with the United States, with Hermann Schumacher serving as the first Kaiser Wilhelm Professor to Columbia University from 1906 to 1907. The United States was now an imperial power, and Schumacher’s extensive travel through the country and to Cuba revealed its vast potential but also its challenges to Germany. Strong parallels were suggested with Russia, reinforcing more Eurasian aspirations for German “World Policy.”

This chapter analyzes the role that the dreadnought arms race with Britain began to play in Germany asa surrogate for its largely failed “World Policy” and how that contributed to a growing German debt crisis. In the six years before the outbreak of war, keeping to a set ratio of German and British battleships was increasingly linked with Germany’s “world status” and national honor in the minds of the German public, and Schmoller and his students had played a key role in shaping these perceptions. Even so, it put impossible strains on German public finances, the reform of which became the last major campaign of Bülow’s career and to which von Halle and Schmoller contributed actively. This reform fell far short and ultimately cost Bülow his chancellorship. Matching Franco-Russian military expansion would add additional fiscal burdens and a heightened sense of insecurity. One of the few remaining prongs of "World Policy," the Baghdad railroad, faced impossible hurdles that Karl Helfferich was enlisted to overcome. Ultimately a grand bargain between Britain and Germany around Mesopotamian oil cleared the remaining hurdles for its completion just weeks before the outbreak of war.