He was a grandiose personality with a massively inflated sense of his own historical importance, given to outlandish foreign policy proposals that his advisers and underlings had to ignore or walk back or pretend to take seriously. He loved military pomp and ceremony and viewed himself as a brilliant strategist, despite a total lack of expertise or experience. His intemperate public remarks sparked international outrage, creating crises his subordinates were forced to repair. He finally walked his country into a disastrous and entirely avoidable war that destroyed his reputation and inflicted enormous worldwide damage, with devastating ripple effects that extended decades into the future. One prominent historian described his personality as
superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success … romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off.
