What Bismarck taught Dominic Cummings He played politics like nobody else

Otto von Bismarck preoccupies Dominic Cummings. If you spend any time reading his blog, you will have noted the 1890 Punch cartoon Dropping the Pilot. The Pilot in question is a thick-necked walrus, Bismarck, descending from the Prussian ship of state, peered down upon idly by a fresh-faced Kaiser Wilhelm II. This image adorns his pinned post, written in December 2023, which serves as its author’s definitive statement on his obsession.

The article in question is an introduction to a much longer piece of work, a 393-page chronology of Bismarck’s career up to 1867. This chronology is a most impressive feat of scholarship, 20 years in the making. It occurred to me, while reading it — with Otto Pflanze’s three-volume biography of Bismarck to hand, as per the author’s instructions — that Cummings might have a stronger grasp over all things Bismarck than any professional historian currently active in Britain. There might yet be a handful of German eggheads who could give him a run for his money.

Cummings’s obsession with Germany’s first chancellor began as a teenager, and shaped his thinking while he was attempting to pilot our own ship of state through the stormy weather of Brexit and Covid. “I’ve recently read some of the media commentary about 2019 that I ignored at the time and it’s amazing how many hacks thought I was trying to use [von Neumann’s] game theory”, he complains. “I was not. I did pinch ideas from how Bismarck dealt with the Prussian constitutional crisis.” With the parliamentarians in 1862 refusing to comply with the government’s wish to increase military spending, and the Kaiser supposedly on the brink of resignation, Bismarck stared them down, brushed them aside, and ultimately got his way. There were indeed traces of “Blood and Iron” in Cummings’s and Boris Johnson’s resolve over parliamentary prorogation in his first days in Downing Street.

That the media is wrong about everything is an axiom of Cummings Thought. He felt it necessary to sketch his Bismarck-chronology partly because the 19th-century media was no better, and has deceived many historians. His inside knowledge of political life thoroughly disabused him of the reliability of “official stories”. He learned to recognise that the things people say about politics are seldom actually the case; and so it follows that the things people say about political history are seldom actually the case, either. The Bismarck chronology thus isolates those few things about Bismarck’s career which we can know more or less for certain, and around which we can then attempt to construct more robust narratives and theories.

That, in itself, is a lesson worth learning: the stark disconnect between “official stories” and what really happened. Nowhere was this clearer than in the spectacle of conspiracy theories (Russian misinformation, Cambridge Analytica) solidifying into “official stories” in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum: “the media is incapable of analysing the intersection of politics and technology” and actively “disinforms the public”. The “official story”, moreover, tends to flatter decision-makers, giving them agency and control; and one thing Bismarck can teach us, as Cummings is keen to stress, is the importance of dumb luck. Bismarck, he notes, was only appointed in the first place because of a “meltdown in royal circles” over which he had no real control. And if the aim of one would-be assassin, Ferdinand Cohen-Blind, had been only slightly different in May 1866, “the German states would certainly have evolved in a different way” — no First World War, no Hitler.

But if Bismarck had been entirely at the mercy of fortune, what would be the point of encouraging aspiring leaders, as Cummings did in his “Essay on an ‘Odyssean’ Education”, to take heed of his example? One aspect of Bismarck’s genius — Cummings does not shy away from that word — is that he harnessed the randomness of the world to his advantage. He was a brilliant practitioner of what Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (another Cummings favourite) called “Cheng/Ch’i” operations, feigned unpredictability to throw off the enemy. One hears much about “grand strategy” in international affairs, but Bismarck’s example suggests that the best way for countries to ruthlessly pursue their interests is by not “picking a strategy” at all. It may be no coincidence that Cummings had these thoughts during the early phases of the first Trump administration, nor that he senses amid the chaos of Trump’s present term some opportunities for wholesale reform.

Cummings is ever eager to emphasise that his admiration for Bismarck is not of a moral kind; indeed, he often says that the world would be better off today had Bismarck never existed. Still, given the extent of his enthusiasm — and of his vanity — it is natural to wonder whether he sees something of himself in Bismarck. The historian Katja Hoyer thinks so, and even traces some vague points of parallel between Bismarck’s career in government and Cummings’s — although even in a rather hostile article, she is too polite to point out that it is difficult to imagine the Iron Chancellor getting outfoxed in the halls of power by Carrie Symonds (Bismarck excelled at freezing the Kaiser’s wife, Victoria, out of the Prussian court). Hoyer claims, meanwhile, that Bismarck would never have written an “itemised response to every rumour that his enemies spread about him in the press”, but this I don’t find too difficult to imagine. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen said in 1875 that Bismarck “nurses thoughts of revenge and retaliation for real or imagined slights that he has suffered”; and who knows how these might have manifested had Bismarck been acquainted with Substack.

Some of Cummings’s political behaviour has a Bismarckian flavour. He is proudly cynical and non-partisan, and, like Bismarck, partial to the “secret meeting”: Bismarck with the flamboyant socialist leader, Ferdinand Lassalle; Cummings with everyone from Jeremy Corbyn’s communications team in 2019 to, it recently transpired, Nigel Farage. Notwithstanding his occasional social media rantings, Cummings strikes me as less of a mess of a man than Bismarck, who was constantly in tears and threatening to kill himself; tantrums and high emotions are not to be underrated as blunt instruments in his “diabolical” toolkit.

Beyond all this, I am not so sure that Cummings does fancy himself as a latter-day Bismarck. The subtitle to his chronology is “A Case Study of the Unrecognised Simplicities of High Performance”, and Cummings, who hawks books such as Superforecasting and The Scout Mindset to anyone who will listen, strives to be an expert “recogniser” of things “unrecognised”. Cummings’s Bismarck, at least when seen from the outside, is more a phenomenon than a human of flesh and blood; he is, in fact, a “super-intelligence”.

Cummings has used this metaphor on multiple occasions, and he means it seriously. Watching Bismarck “play politics” is akin to watching the best computers play chess; they’re not just playing it better than the rest of us, but “so differently that it’s really a different game”. Elsewhere, Cummings writes that the question Bismarck forces us to ponder — a question “relevant” to debates over AI today — is “how much was the effectiveness bound up with the dangerousness”. Cummings’s chronology lingers on the bourgeois teetering that met Bismarck on his elevation to the chancellorship in 1862 by those who recognised neither his effectiveness nor his dangerousness; he draws for us an intellectually hollow world order utterly unprepared for what was about to hit it, incapable even of seeing it for what it was. And those few who did recognise Bismarck’s brilliance — Albrecht von Roon, for example, who summoned him to be chancellor with his famous telegram, Periculum in mora — made the other fatal error, of assuming that he would “align” with their interests rather than pursuing his own; they recognised his effectiveness but not his dangerousness. Bismarck was not predicted or understood by “professors” and “pundits”; “the odd ‘maverick’ warns ‘you’re making a fatal error, I beg you to reconsider’ but is dismissed by the experts”. Cummings clearly isn’t Bismarck in this story: he’s the “maverick”.

Sir Christopher Clark, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, wrote that Cummings “resembles those Germans who, as Max Weber observed in 1917, admired [Bismarck] not for the ‘grandeur of his subtle, sovereign mind, but exclusively for the element of violence and cunning in his statesmanship, the real or imagined brutality in his methods’”. Perhaps there is some blind power-worship afoot; some of Cummings’s ramblings certainly give that impression. Yet Bismarck, for Cummings, isn’t just a character plucked from the past for shrewd leaders to emulate, but a phenomenon which shrewd leaders will have to learn to recognise: something that transcends the usual rules and orders, something that threatens to upend everything, something — like, perhaps, Artificial Intelligence — that leaders will have to see even when elite opinion or the “official story” does not. On that recognition, the future of humanity might well depend; yet, with enough Bismarckian initiative, those threats might even present opportunities. Some of Cummings’s earliest published thoughts on AI, composed back when he was a little-known minion to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, closed, much in this vein, with one of Bismarck’s most celebrated bons mots. “Technical changes such as genetic engineering and machine intelligence are bringing revolution. It would be better to undertake it than undergo it.”

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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