Thank you Catfish.
I don't think there is much there to disagree with.
The Kaiser was never an all powerful dictator in the sense that Hitler was, and his historical image has probably suffered because many people choose to make that simplistic comparison. By 1916 the military were effectively governing the country and not the Kaiser.
The point still remains that Germany was not a democracy in the sense that Britain, France and the USA were. There were too many people directing Germany's governance who were not accountable, and who were relatively willing to pursue militaristic and expansionist policies.
The Kaiser must, however, shoulder some of the blame for destabilising the fragile politics of Europe, but probably for reasons of sillyness rather than outright aggression. He was undoubtedly somewhat "unbalanced" ( some heads of state even questioned whether he was mentally all there !).
None of that detracts from the point that ALL countries and their heads of government acted with self interest, and this, in itself, vitually guaranteed a major European war at some point or another.
To reiterate what I said earlier, the autocratic countries were, on balance, more culpable for the tragedy of WW1 than the democracies. However the "blame" clause of the Versailles Treaty was unecessarilly harsh. It made it easy for somebody with more hair brained dictatorial ambitions to lead Germany into a second major war