China has outperformed Imperial Germany as a burgeoning maritime power. During the fin de siècle decades, German naval potentates—chiefly Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the Kaiser’s state secretary for the navy—talked themselves into believing they could accomplish their goals by putting to sea a “risk fleet” a fraction the size of the enemy’s, the presumable enemy being Great Britain’s Royal Navy. China has done Admiral Tirpitz one better. It has outbuilt the entirety of its major nemesis, the US Navy, positioning Chinese forces well to face the fraction of the Navy they will face on likely oceanic battlefields. Germans could only have dreamt of accomplishing as much.

Tirpitz based his calculations on two assumptions—first, that the Royal Navy needed one-third superiority in numbers of battleships and battlecruisers in order to triumph in a climactic fleet battle in the North Sea, the body of water separating the British Isles from the German coast. Running the arithmetic, that means he believed the German High Seas Fleet could get by with a force three-quarters the size of the British foe. Germany, then, need not necessarily outbuild Britain in a ship-for-ship arms race. It could make do with less.

Second, Tirpitz believed that the Royal Navy would clamor to sail into the North Sea to do battle in time of war. That was, after all, what Lord Nelson had done at Trafalgar a century ago. Nelsonian practices were stamped on Royal Navy culture; therefore, the Germans could expect the British to do the same in the twentieth century.

But if the Royal Navy was predisposed to pitched fleet engagements, Tirpitz postulated, the political leadership in London would shy away from the clangor of naval arms. After all, if the Royal Navy should fight a decisive battle and lose, Britain would have forfeited its main implement for policing an empire on which the sun never set. It would have sacrificed its global commercial and diplomatic interests for the sake of commanding the North Sea, an expanse of doubtful strategic worth. While Britain’s navy eagerly accepted risk, in other words, Tirpitz prophesied that Britain’s government would shy away from it. Germany would prevail at sea by default.

Alas for Tirpitz’ convoluted scheme, the British leadership drew down imperial commitments in such precincts as the Far East and the Americas in order to bring home foreign squadrons, break up obsolete but pricey hulls, and........

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