"...temptation. The fact was that the newly installed Andrassy government was a temporary solution, and one in which it was widely understood that power was held not by the aging count or Janos Hadik but rather by "irreconcilables" such as Khuen-Hedervary or, really, Tisza, the central figure of the White faction whose exclusion from formal power was becoming increasingly difficult if Ferdinand wanted a Hungarian government of anything other than civil servants not responsible to the House of Representatives - which, quite frankly, he did not, and thus the Andrassy Cabinet would have to do. Nonetheless, the Milan Magyars and L'affaire Bethlen had left the Emperor badly damaged, and in the aftermath he made a gamble that in the end left him even weaker than before - the brief "Charm Offensive," as it came to be known, towards Berlin.
Ferdinand's contempt for the Magyar people, politically and racially, was well-known, but he was also not the Slavophile whom many historians have come to portray him as; he liked Czech culture thanks to his extensive time in Prague but was ambivalent at best about the Poles and most certainly did not care for Croats or Serbs beyond his opportunistic sense that they were useful in his struggle with Magyarism. Ferdinand was not a believer in Pan-Germanism, viewing Prussia as an alien culture who shared only a common language with Austrians, but he nonetheless saw "Alpinism," an ideology beginning to form out of the remnants of Karl Lueger's worldview, as potentially complementary to Prussianism. And why not? Strategically, Berlin and Vienna had no overlapping disputes - the Germans were increasingly looking to Asia and were interested in the Balkans only to satisfy the demands of their Italian allies. Ferdinand considered Austria's exclusion from the German Empire a settled matter, as did his counterpart Kaiser Heinrich, who held the Habsburg name in high esteem (though Pan-Germanists disagreed fundamentally with this position); there was a sense emergent at the Schonbrunn, encouraged by many of the Prague Circle, that Austria's alliance with France was borne out of the immediate frustrations of the late 1860s and the Unification Wars, and had been signed by the Alte Herr Franz Josef and the Petit-Aigle Napoleon IV forty years ago and thus no longer reflected the strategic needs of Austria-Hungary as the 1920s beckoned. Ferdinand was the new era of the Habsburgs, and a rethinking of not just constitutional governance but strategic alignments was just as much a modernizing tact.
Ferdinand's thinking was governed by two general ideas. The first was that it seemed apparent to him, as well as Austrian war planners, that in a general war Germany would defend in the west and attack to the east, aiming to seize western Galicia quickly to cut Carpathian mountain passes while pressing towards Ostrau and Linz as quickly as possible to seize Austria's industrial heartlands. The reinforced Bohemian mountain passes would be tied down with artillery to prevent a counterattack, and Italy could put immediate pressure on Trento and the Istrian Plateau beyond the Isonzo River to attempt to capture crucial Trieste. These war plans had always favored the Dual Monarchy thanks to the defensibility of their frontiers with both of the "Central Powers," but now Ferdinand was concerned about the extent to which he could rely on Hungarian soldiers in such a conflict, or whether there would be a revolt from some or even many brigades and divisions of the Honved that would tie down the Common Army. The weakness of the Dual Monarchy had never been more apparent, either, and rising Italian influence in Belgrade opened the question if Serbia - no longer ruled by the Austrophilic Obrenovic family - would make a play for parts of the Banat simultaneously, and that left another uncomfortable question about Romanian intentions. Austria was, perhaps, more surrounded than she had ever been before.
The second thought that occurred to Ferdinand was that he was not entirely sure if he could depend on France. Napoleon V was very much not his father, a polite and pious but deeply strange young man pressed firmly under his nonagenarian grandmother's thumb who was easily influenced by vapid courtiers, conservative priests, and his smattering of "cousins" from Belgium who shuttled between Brussels and Paris as if they ruled both. France was typically on the cutting edge technologically with their military kit, especially in terms of air power where they were regarded as second to none, and had just showed their ruthlessness off in Vietnam, but with their massive colonial empire had other goals not aligned with those of Austria, first and foremost in North Africa, where undermining rather than supporting the Ottomans was increasingly in vogue in Paris. Ferdinand did not know if Paris would in fact be there should war at some point arise, what with his distinct inability to trust anybody there.
An alliance with Germany, on the other hand, held all kinds of benefits. It immediately eliminated Austria's largest enemy along its longest borders, allowing Austria to concentrate her energies on the Italian frontier; it brought two German-speaking monarchies back in alignment with each other, along with continental Europe's largest and second-largest populations (excluding Russia, of course), its largest and third-largest economies, and would control a wide swath of the continent from the Danube to the North Sea. Italian and French rivalry in Africa and claims of irredenta over Corsica and Nice would preclude an alignment between the Houses of Savoy and Bonaparte, even before one considered France's opposition to Italian occupation of the Leonine City and the Church's fierce opposition to the government in Rome; this would, in all likelihood, leave Italy forced to either stand alone or begrudgingly accept an alliance with Vienna. With this new "Triple Alliance" formed temporarily, France would be isolated politically and militarily, essentially ending any threat of war in Europe for decades. The Iron Triangle had served its purpose - now it was time for a new alignment by a new generation.
Ferdinand's visit to Berlin to secretly discuss these matters in October 1917 could not have gone worse, even if at first glance it was a cordial visit. Heinrich had earned a reputation in his younger years as aloof from European politics, rarely reading newspapers and waving through the desires of his various ministers, in particular the powerful Chancellor Furstenburg who had now been in power for thirteen years. The Heinrich of 1917, however, could sense the unease beginning to creep across the continent and as he approached his sixtieth birthday had developed not an encyclopedic understanding of current affairs like many of his peers and predecessors had, but was nonetheless savvier than met the eye. Heinrich admired the House of Habsburg - its traditions, its longevity, its prestige - and had been excited by the accession of Ferdinand as a fresh new influence, but an outright alliance was out of the question. For one, Heinrich had little confidence in the Hungarian Crisis being solved anytime soon; having taken at least one Magyar woman as a mistress in his reign, he was unusually well-read on the grievances of the Hungarian street and understood Ferdinand's lack of interest in actually addressing said grievances. Further, the ongoing constitutional crisis suggested that Ferdinand's feelers were not ones coming from a place of strength but rather desperation - Furstenburg, in particular, surmised privately to the Kaiser that what Ferdinand perhaps really wanted was for Berlin to "solve" his problem for him. While Furstenburg was intrigued by the idea of an "unequal" alliance with Vienna that would see them as the clearly junior partner in a relationship, Heinrich demurred, not wanting to make any commitments until the matters in the Dual Monarchy were fully solved.
It was also further the case that Heinrich was nervous about Russia's reaction to a realignment on her borders; a huge part of Russia's "turn from Europe" since 1878 had been that Germany and Austria were at each other's throats, and thus the Bear did not have to worry about a potential threat on her immediate western frontiers. When combined with her cordial relations with Romania (underwritten in part by German reassurances in treaty form), Russia's European borders had never been more secure, which had allowed for her ambitions in Central Asia and the Orient to be successful and restore her imperial prestige. A German-Austrian alliance would immediately change all that, and while Heinrich was confident that Russia would not see it as a preemptive move towards a war of choice in the east - he had, after all, done well to keep the most ardent of Prussian chauvinists obsessed with Drang nach Osten ideas out of his immediate inner circle for more clear-eyed realists such as Furstenburg - he nonetheless was concerned enough about Romanov nervousness to want to avoid arousing a potential enemy he did not need to have. Longstanding dynastic enmity between the Romanovs and the Bonapartes was not sufficient as a guarantor that France and Russia would never align, and the risk of a Russo-French alliance sandwiching Germany was far too high, especially as Russia began more rapidly modernizing and industrializing in the late 1910s.
And so Ferdinand charmed his German hosts, regaling them with hunting stories, and in particular bonded with Heinrich over their shared love of yachting and navies, but it was to no avail. Heinrich politely but bluntly declined a "formalizing a change" in "German strategic thinking," which was a coded diplomatic way of stating that Germany was disinterested in alignment, though he left the door open to "revisions in the European order as circumstances evolve." Ferdinand was embarrassed and angry, having spent weeks away from Vienna as the stalemate in Hungary persisted for nothing. Indeed, the "Charm Offensive" gave him worse than nothing, for French spies caught wind of the meetings there, and soon Austrian officialdom was angrily accosted by their French counterparts, who demanded answers, and Ferdinand was forced to dispatch Tisza, brought to Vienna as his personal foreign minister and envoy to keep him out of Budapest, to Paris to smooth the ruffled feathers of the Raymond Poincare government.
This trial balloon with Germany wound up being more damaging than Ferdinand could have realized - France was now deeply suspicious of its ally and strategic thinking in Paris shifted quickly towards a more provocative manner, for two reasons. One, it was now assumed that Ferdinand was willing to walk away from France, and French politicians took this to mean they had to be more nakedly favorable towards Austria in public to keep Vienna "on-side;" and two, it meant that there may be a limited period of time in which the Franco-Austrian alliance under which two or three generations of staff officers had planned France's strategic operational plans had come up was able to actually fight a war, and that if France was to have a war with Germany, it needed to have it soon while that window was still open before Ferdinand got any new ideas..."
- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor