In the words of Louis Rossman 'If you're going to be the bitch, be the whole bitch!' If you believe might makes right, then you better be ready to fight.
"It wasn't Bosnia, it was the North Sea"? I don't know, I think your argument is insightful but it also feels a bit like an elegant argument is bullying the historical record to align just right..
Dead Karl, I read your piece and honestly, I liked it. The way you frame Realism versus the legibility of intentions is sharp, and your dive into Tirpitz and the Risikoflotte is solid stuff. But—and there’s always a but—I kept feeling like I was being walked down a very neat, very straight path. The naval build-up caused war? Sure, maybe, but maybe also not. That causal claim needs a little more… breathing room. History doesn’t hand out guarantees, it hands out probabilities, rumors, and misreads. Tirpitz might’ve thought a bigger fleet would make Britain blink. Britain didn’t blink. Germany went in, got exactly what you say: the Entente tighter than a drum. But it wasn’t inevitable, not in any mechanical sense.
The piece flirts with this formulaic Realist lens where actions equal outcomes, signals equal interpretations, build fleets equal catastrophe. And yeah, it works as an argument if you like your history neat, but real people, real states, don’t follow formulas. Popular opinion, elite ego, misperceptions, signaling blunders—all of that muddies the water. I liked the sections where you treat alliances as trust games, where the people and the elites actually matter. That’s the meat. The rest—well, it occasionally reads like Tirpitz was doomed by theory rather than by his own bad reads of human behavior. History isn’t a board game with predictable moves; it’s messy, and that’s where the real story is.
So yeah, solid work, smart analysis, but maybe let the “naval build-up equals war” thesis loosen up a bit. Let the contingencies, the accidents, the misperceptions breathe. Otherwise, it risks sounding like a warning from the safe zone of a theory textbook, rather than a real tour through the chaos of Wilhelmine foreign policy.
What I aimed to emphasize in this piece was the manner in which Tirpitz's convictions (derived from theory) blinded him to other considerations. He followed a formula to a fault, placing undue faith in its accuracy, which is a kind of human error. What I particularly wanted to get across was the way in which an intellectual error allows persistence in error. He was doomed by theory, but his theory, not mine.
The other element is that the role of popular opinion meant that Britain almost couldn't blink. That is not to say that any other outcome was impossible, but that it would have taken a herculean effort to bring Britain out of its alliance with France and into alignment with Germany, especially when Germany was using coercion to seek this.
The aim was not give a general tour of Wilhelmine foreign policy, but to look to the Risikoflotte and Tirpitz as an example of the consequences of adherence to bad theory. The belief that a larger fleet would induce British cooperation was a fundamental misunderstanding of how international relations worked. War was not inevitable, but worse relations were.
The point about Tirpitz “following the science” is especially persuasive. There is no science about the real world, only science in controlled settings. Following a formula is, in my opinion, like mortgaging your house for sports betting because you know a good tipster on YouTube. Once you don’t consider that you might lose, you are truly lost.
It was a very fine article, and insightful for me, especially in how it highlighted the strategic naval buildup and searched for causes of the outbreak of the Great War in Western Europe, since I am studying more Central and Eastern Europe.
I totally agree with your conclusions: the moment loss is ruled out, you’re not thinking anymore, you’re all in, blind, without even checking one card.
The lion's share of your paper concerns German behaviour driving Britain into the Triple Entente before WW1. It is easy to think from 2025 this a foregone conclusion.
However, it was on 2 August 1914 that the Asquith Cabinet voted for war. All previous votes had been against by large majorities.
"War was much more the sport of kings [In the 18th Century] than the struggle between peoples it would later become". I think you have mis-interpreted a comment in chapter 1 The Wars of the Knights of Michael Howard's 1976 War In European History about chivalry. Before the 1700s, he points out that barbarian incursions obeyed no rules and "a crusade was virtually a war of extermination" in which whole communites were put to the sword. The 1618-48 Thirty Years' War saw perhaps 8 million casualties from battle, famine, and disease, and the English Civil War witnessed the same percentage of the population die horribly, with concomitant dislocation of the economy.
"states do not primarily consider the distribution of power in the international system when choosing alliance partners" - you really did need to substantiate this statement. Or was it left in by mistake from a previous draft?
In the words of Louis Rossman 'If you're going to be the bitch, be the whole bitch!' If you believe might makes right, then you better be ready to fight.
Exactly. It might make sense to shoot someone at times, but routinely brandishing a gun is a uniformly bad idea.
"It wasn't Bosnia, it was the North Sea"? I don't know, I think your argument is insightful but it also feels a bit like an elegant argument is bullying the historical record to align just right..
Dead Karl, I read your piece and honestly, I liked it. The way you frame Realism versus the legibility of intentions is sharp, and your dive into Tirpitz and the Risikoflotte is solid stuff. But—and there’s always a but—I kept feeling like I was being walked down a very neat, very straight path. The naval build-up caused war? Sure, maybe, but maybe also not. That causal claim needs a little more… breathing room. History doesn’t hand out guarantees, it hands out probabilities, rumors, and misreads. Tirpitz might’ve thought a bigger fleet would make Britain blink. Britain didn’t blink. Germany went in, got exactly what you say: the Entente tighter than a drum. But it wasn’t inevitable, not in any mechanical sense.
The piece flirts with this formulaic Realist lens where actions equal outcomes, signals equal interpretations, build fleets equal catastrophe. And yeah, it works as an argument if you like your history neat, but real people, real states, don’t follow formulas. Popular opinion, elite ego, misperceptions, signaling blunders—all of that muddies the water. I liked the sections where you treat alliances as trust games, where the people and the elites actually matter. That’s the meat. The rest—well, it occasionally reads like Tirpitz was doomed by theory rather than by his own bad reads of human behavior. History isn’t a board game with predictable moves; it’s messy, and that’s where the real story is.
So yeah, solid work, smart analysis, but maybe let the “naval build-up equals war” thesis loosen up a bit. Let the contingencies, the accidents, the misperceptions breathe. Otherwise, it risks sounding like a warning from the safe zone of a theory textbook, rather than a real tour through the chaos of Wilhelmine foreign policy.
I've addressed the outbreak of WWI and personal contingency more in this piece on civil-military relations in Wilhelmine Germany: https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-military (see the section on Helmuth von Moltke the Younger).
What I aimed to emphasize in this piece was the manner in which Tirpitz's convictions (derived from theory) blinded him to other considerations. He followed a formula to a fault, placing undue faith in its accuracy, which is a kind of human error. What I particularly wanted to get across was the way in which an intellectual error allows persistence in error. He was doomed by theory, but his theory, not mine.
The other element is that the role of popular opinion meant that Britain almost couldn't blink. That is not to say that any other outcome was impossible, but that it would have taken a herculean effort to bring Britain out of its alliance with France and into alignment with Germany, especially when Germany was using coercion to seek this.
The aim was not give a general tour of Wilhelmine foreign policy, but to look to the Risikoflotte and Tirpitz as an example of the consequences of adherence to bad theory. The belief that a larger fleet would induce British cooperation was a fundamental misunderstanding of how international relations worked. War was not inevitable, but worse relations were.
And thanks for sharing your other article, I will certainly check it as well as other of your writing in modern German history
The point about Tirpitz “following the science” is especially persuasive. There is no science about the real world, only science in controlled settings. Following a formula is, in my opinion, like mortgaging your house for sports betting because you know a good tipster on YouTube. Once you don’t consider that you might lose, you are truly lost.
It was a very fine article, and insightful for me, especially in how it highlighted the strategic naval buildup and searched for causes of the outbreak of the Great War in Western Europe, since I am studying more Central and Eastern Europe.
I totally agree with your conclusions: the moment loss is ruled out, you’re not thinking anymore, you’re all in, blind, without even checking one card.
The lion's share of your paper concerns German behaviour driving Britain into the Triple Entente before WW1. It is easy to think from 2025 this a foregone conclusion.
However, it was on 2 August 1914 that the Asquith Cabinet voted for war. All previous votes had been against by large majorities.
"War was much more the sport of kings [In the 18th Century] than the struggle between peoples it would later become". I think you have mis-interpreted a comment in chapter 1 The Wars of the Knights of Michael Howard's 1976 War In European History about chivalry. Before the 1700s, he points out that barbarian incursions obeyed no rules and "a crusade was virtually a war of extermination" in which whole communites were put to the sword. The 1618-48 Thirty Years' War saw perhaps 8 million casualties from battle, famine, and disease, and the English Civil War witnessed the same percentage of the population die horribly, with concomitant dislocation of the economy.
"states do not primarily consider the distribution of power in the international system when choosing alliance partners" - you really did need to substantiate this statement. Or was it left in by mistake from a previous draft?