Sarah Paine

Oh, limited and unlimited objectives.

Yeah, Bismarck does illustrate that.

An unlimited objective is the simplest way to look at it is regime change.

So if I have an unlimited objective against you, I win the war, you're going to be out of power.

And as versus I win the war and yeah, you lose a province, but you'll be in power.

So what Bismarck does, he's very clever.

Well, he's operating in an age of kings and actually his achievements illustrates why you truly don't need royal families running the show.

It's breathtakingly incompetent.

So initially, he fights the Danish War.

So that's way up north.

And it's over these two provinces.

And he wants to set his fingers on the scale of the more northerly province, because then that'll give him the rights to march troops, I think, through the more southerly one to cause problems later.

So war number one's the Danish War.

No one thinks too much about it.

Prussia gets an extra province as part of Denmark, was part of Denmark, no big deal.

But then he fights the Austro-Prussian War.

And then what he's after is there are all these little Germanic states and Austria had dominated a bunch of them.

And in that war, a whole bunch of them, as a result of that war,

he collects a whole bunch of these other states.

And no one is really paying attention that he's actually upending the balance of power in Europe.