Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck served as Chancellor of Germany in the 1870s and 1880s. It was under his leadership that Germany was unified into a single nation-state for the first time. His major foreign policy goal was the isolation of France, which he saw as Germany's greatest enemy. As part of this policy, he negotiated an alliance against France, Britain, and the Confederate States (later joined by Russia and a number of others) with the United States that eventually became the Central Powers alliance system.