the world's dominant power. The was split into three factions competing against one another, namely one faction of men loyal to Bismarck, another faction loyal to Friedrich von Holstein, and yet another faction led by Prince Philipp von Eulenburg and Prince Bernhard von Bülow, who would later become chancellor. This constant plotting and scheming between these factions weakened the execution of German foreign policy. As a whole, the Wilhelmstrasse was never entirely in charge of foreign policy in the German Empire, but was instead just one out of several agencies, albeit a very important one that made and executed foreign policy. In the years 1904–1907, the Reich attempted to form an alliance with the United States on the basis of the supposedly shared fear of the "Yellow Peril" with Wilhelm writing to the American President Theodore Roosevelt a series of letters telling him that Germany and the United States must join forces to stop the "yellow peril", especially Japan from conquering the world. It took the diplomats a long time to tell Wilhelm that Roosevelt was a Japanophile who was not impressed with Wilhelm's call for an alliance based on anti-Asian racism. Ottomans and the Armenians A nation with whom the was much concerned during the Imperial period was the Ottoman empire, especially during the Armenian genocide. In 1915, the German ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Baron Hans von Wangenheim told the American ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Henry Morgenthau Sr.: "I do not blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians... They are entirely justified". On September 28, 1915 Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the ambassador in Washington, D.C., stated to American journalists that reports of a systematic campaign of extermination against the Armenian minority in the Ottoman empire were all "pure inventions", that these reports were all the work of British propaganda and no such campaign of extermination was taking place. Wangenheim's successor as ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Count Paul Wolff Metternich, was appalled by the Armenian genocide, and, unlike Wangenheim, Metternich was prepared to speak out against the genocide. In August 1916, the triumvirate known as the Three Pashas, which ruled the Ottoman empire, informed the German government that if Count Metternich was not recalled, he would be declared persona non grata. Metternich was promptly recalled from Constantinople rather risk a public relations disaster which potentially could damage German-Ottoman relations in the middle