The ten rules governing how our new world really works (Rule 8: The Promised Land Fallacy; Von Tirpitz Disastrously Builds a Navy)
Introduction: The Dangerous Mirage of the Promised Land Fallacy
Distantly related to the losing gambler’s syndrome is the promised land fallacy, the naive view that one attribute of power or one strategy is sufficient to overcome the complexity of the world and—in a silver bullet-like fashion—change the terms of the geopolitical game. In essence, it’s a very human effort to falsely manufacture a game-changing strategy rather than recognising that a game-changing event generally happens organically. Political risk analysts throughout the ages, frustrated by the constraints of living in the world as they have found it, are often highly susceptible to dreaming up analysis designed to liberate them from the shackles of reality. Ruinously, reality always wins.
In the years following the innovative genius of Salisbury’s foreign policy, Anglo-German relations nevertheless spiralled out of control. No one was more responsible for this than Alfred von Tirpitz, whose wrong-headed strategy to supersede the British navy instead led Germany directly over the cliff into the charnel house of the Great War.
For Wilhelmine Germany, the building of a fleet from scratch to challenge the mighty Royal Navy was meant to be the country’s ticket to its place in the sun. The German political and military elite, frustrated that the world (especially haughty Britain) failed to recognise the ascension of Germany to great power status, set about rushing the forces of history, rather than merely waiting for their yearly relative gains in global power to become apparent over time. Already possessing the greatest army in the world, the kaiser became obsessed with building a threatening navy.
Instead of heralding an era of German dominance, the elite in Berlin unwittingly started a process that led to its doom. The naval race awoke an alarmed London to the coming German threat to its position as the greatest single power in the world (though one in relative decline, as we have seen), a fact that helped directly lead to war and ruinous German defeat.
Far from leading to the promised land, this approach puts political risk analysts forever at the mercy of the latest intellectual fad, leading to simplistic analysis that doesn’t stand up to the realities of a complicated world.
Von Tirpitz Recklessly Challenges British Naval Dominance
Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz became the living embodiment of the kaiser’s drive to build a world-class navy. Born March 19, 1849, pictures of von Tirpitz show a man looking like nothing so much as an enraged walrus, with his long, flowing beard, fierce eyes, and stern countenance.
Yet von Tirpitz was much more than this caricature of a stiff-necked Prussian. For one thing, he knew the English personally and well, spoke the language fluently, and even sent his two daughters to the prestigious Cheltenham Ladies’ College. For another, von Tirpitz rose through the German navy’s ranks largely through his own merits, something unheard of at the time. In the 1870s and 1880s, he was at the forefront of military technology, championing the development of a new class of torpedoes and torpedo boats for the puny German navy. Tirpitz, for all the Prussian glowering, was essentially a creative, outward-looking, self-made man.
His big break came in 1887, when he escorted then Crown Prince Wilhelm across the English Channel to attend the Golden Jubilee celebrations of his grandmother, Queen Victoria. On the way over, von Tirpitz managed to persuade the excitable prince to focus in the future on building battleships as the linchpin of the fledgling German navy. The future kaiser fell in immediately with these ambitious plans, and von Tirpitz was transferred back to Berlin to begin work on setting out a strategy for creating a powerful German High Seas Fleet.
On December 1, 1892, von Tirpitz presented his recommendations to Wilhelm, who had unexpectedly succeeded his father as kaiser. As a sign of his continuing favour, Wilhelm made von Tirpitz chief of the naval staff in 1892, and a rear admiral in 1895. However, for all his laurels, von Tirpitz chafed at the fact that his ambitious recommendations had yet to be acted on. In the autumn of 1895, he asked to be replaced from his senior strategic planning position.
The kaiser, not wishing to part with his guru, instead asked him to prepare a new set of recommendations for all future German ship construction. It was at this point, in 1897, that von Tirpitz was made head of the powerful Imperial Navy Office, an unassailable bureaucratic perch that allowed him to relentlessly focus on making the German navy a force to be reckoned with.
On June 15, 1897, von Tirpitz presented his review on the composition and strategic purpose of a new German navy to the kaiser, overtly identifying Britain as Germany’s principal foe for the first time. The primary recommendation was that Germany must build as many battleships as possible, if it was to challenge British naval hegemony. Initially, von Tirpitz advocated the creation of two squadrons of eight battleships, plus a fleet flagship and two reserves.
For its time, the first von Tirpitz plan was revolutionary in that it made a clear, unambiguous strategic statement of Germany’s naval goals and how to meet them, rather than following the then-accepted custom that military expenditures would be considered piecemeal, and year-to-year.
The initial impetus spurring on this ambitious German naval programme had been the threat the British Foreign Office made to Berlin in March 1897 following the outbreak of the Boer War. London had made it abundantly clear that, owing to broad German sympathy for the Boer cause in South Africa, the Royal Navy would blockade the German coast, and thus cripple its emerging economy, if Berlin intervened on the Boers’ side.
This intolerable affront to the thin-skinned kaiser allowed von Tirpitz to skilfully use the crisis to win the king over to his point of view that Germany would only be taken seriously as a great power if it built a navy that reflected its new status in the world.
Initially, conservatives in the Reichstag felt that significant expenditure on the puny navy was wasted, as any extra money available should go to Germany’s powerful army, which would doubtless be the deciding factor in any coming European war. While this was to be borne out by the events of World War I, von Tirpitz managed to overcome his critics, correct as they might have been on the policy.
Heading the German Imperial Naval Office from 1897-1916, von Tirpitz was what today might be classed a ‘political general,’ having almost magical powers to secure appropriations for the German navy from what had been up until then an extremely reluctant Reichstag. His great talent was not as a strategist, but rather his uncanny ability to arouse German public interest and support for the country’s naval expansion, while successfully leveraging the Reichstag to do his bidding and fund his incessant naval requests. To the kaiser’s delight, the first Naval Bill was passed on March 26, 1898, by a vote of 212-139.
This political victory ensured that von Tirpitz would be at the centre of German strategic thinking for the next 19 years. Von Tirpitz came to be nicknamed ‘The Eternal,’ for he remained firmly ensconced at the German Imperial Naval Office, while all those politically around him came and went, victims of the whims of the mercurial kaiser. This bureaucratic staying power added to von Tirpitz’s lustre, giving him enduring leverage within German defence policy-making circles.
For all that the first German Naval Bill looked ominous to London, it did not directly threaten British naval doctrine, as the fledgling German navy was still playing catch-up; it remained roughly the size of the French and Russian fleets, a full rung below the British in terms of naval power.
However, in January 1900, at the height of the Boer War, a British cruiser intercepted three German mail steamers, high-handedly searching them for supplies that might help the hard-pressed Boers. German public outrage was skilfully stoked by von Tirpitz, enabling him to pass a second Naval Bill, which did threaten the strategic balance of power. It called for a doubling of the number of German battleships from 19 to 38, making the German fleet the second largest in the world. The bill sailed through the Reichstag on June 20, 1900.
Between 1898-1912, von Tirpitz managed to get four naval acts through the German Parliament, greatly expanding the size of the country’s High Seas Fleet. Over time, von Tirpitz’s clearly stated strategic goal became to construct a navy that was two-thirds of the size of the dominant British fleet. In the narrowest of terms, von Tirpitz was successful, in that he took the very meagre German navy he found in the 1890s and transformed it into a world-class force. He was rewarded by being made a grand admiral by Wilhelm in 1911. However, the strategic cost of doing so far outweighed the tactical gains.
The irony was that, for both von Tirpitz and the kaiser, the German naval build up was essentially defensive in nature. They did not wish to overwhelm Britain as a revolutionary power, but merely to be taken seriously by it as a valued guarantor of the status quo. The von Tirpitz strategic plan was to build the world’s second-largest navy after Britain’s, announcing Germany’s arrival on the word stage as an undisputed great power.
In this vision, the naval build up would get the Germans to the promised land, make the British see sense and accommodate Germany’s rise to great power status. Yet, as so often has proven the case for those whose political risk analysis leads them to adopt the promised land strategy, unintended consequences overwhelmed these initial goals.
In direct reaction to von Tirpitz’s naval programme, Britain (between 1902-1910) embarked on its own massive naval build up, with the express purpose of safeguarding its naval dominance and seeing off the perceived German strategic threat. Standard British defence policy, inaugurated under Salisbury’s premiership, held that Britain must ensure that its navy remained at least the same size as the world’s next two largest flotillas combined. As such, von Tirpitz’s build up, far from cowing Britain into supporting Germany’s overall geopolitical rise, instead threatened basic British strategic doctrine.
Owing to the obvious superiority of the German army in Europe, Britain was forced to wholly rely on its preponderant naval position to secure its far-flung empire and its own great power status. Crucially, the German naval challenge was one that Britain could simply not afford to ignore, as it threatened core interests. Following the Reichstag’s passing of a second Naval Bill, the British responded in kind, ordering eight King Edward-class battleships as a direct response. The naval arms race was on, sparked by von Tirpitz’s flawed promised land thinking.
The British also developed a revolutionary new class of ship, the ‘dreadnought,’ modelled on HMS Dreadnought, which was launched in 1906, quickly making all previous battleships obsolete. The dreadnoughts amounted to a strategic paradigm shift in that technologically they were the first capital ships to be powered by steam turbines, which enabled them to do a world-beating 21 knots, making them easily the swiftest battleships in the world at the time.
Dreadnoughts had very accurate 12-inch guns capable of long-range fire, as well as a very short construction time: They could be built in just 14 months. HMS Dreadnought was the first modern warship of the twentieth century. Immediately, von Tirpitz’s navy rushed to match England’s breakthrough. The naval arms race had reached its zenith.
The unintended result of the von Tirpitz plan was to leave Germany in the worst of all possible strategic worlds. Its efforts to catch up to the dominant British navy—seeing this as the ticket to the promised land of acceptance of Germany as a great power—narrowed, but did not eliminate, Britain’s maritime advantage. By 1914, Germany did indeed possess the second-largest naval force in the world, though it still remained roughly 40 percent smaller than the Royal Navy. In an immediate, limited sense, the Germans won the naval arms race by whittling down British dominance. But the cost of this pyrrhic victory was exorbitant.
Salisbury’s strategic doctrine—that the Royal Navy had to remain at least the size of its two largest competitors put together—was indeed upended by 1914, owing to the explosive growth of the German and American navies. However, this change in strategic circumstances was enough to alarm Britain into fundamentally changing its foreign and strategic policies, but did not alter the overriding fact that in 1914 it still possessed by a long way the most powerful naval force in the world.
At the start of World War I, Britain had 49 battleships to Germany’s 29, meaning that Berlin had failed to meet von Tirpitz’s ultimate goal for the German navy to be two-third’s of the size of its rival in London. Even worse, in 1914 London had 29 of the cutting-edge dreadnoughts, and Berlin just 17. However, it was the naval arms race that persuaded Britain to wholly adopt Salisbury’s evolving policy and instead look for allies to deal with what was seen—as a result of the von Tirpitz plan—as an increasingly malevolent German threat.
As the German navy posed an increasing challenge to Britain in its home waters, London shifted the bulk of its navy back to the North Sea and the English Channel to protect its very existence. The logical corollary following on from this strategic shift was to make it necessary for London to make diplomatic arrangements with other global powers, such as it was already doing with the United States and Japan, to see that the international commons remained open, and the British Empire safeguarded.
Unwittingly, the promised land fallacy, epitomised by the von Tirpitz plan, led directly to the closer Anglo-French ties that were to form the basis of resistance to Germany in World War I. With Britain pressed to withdraw its Mediterranean fleet to its home waters to fend off the impending German naval threat, much closer ties with Paris became an absolute strategic imperative so as to safeguard the Suez Canal, the jugular of the British Empire.
Britain, turning its back decisively on its nineteenth-century post-Napoleonic foreign policy heritage, allied itself with European powers France, in 1904, and Russia, in 1907. Incredibly, the Germans—pursuing their promised land strategy to secure in von Tirpitz’s words German ‘political independence’ from England—had just forced the British into their eternal enemy France’s waiting arms, the worst possible strategic thing Berlin could have done.
The Haldane Mission as the end of Tirpitz’s Promised Land
This is why the wheels began to come off of Tirpitz’s promised land strategy. By 1912, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg sought to end the naval arms race that the kaiser’s disastrous decision to build a navy had provoked, instead seeking a belated rapprochement with London.
The menacing growth of the Tsarist Russian Army to the east was forcing the Reichstag to spend more money on the German army, and correspondingly less on von Tirpitz’s navy. The naval race had succeeded in alarming Britain—and throwing it into the arms of Germany’s enemies France and Russia—all without overtaking the Royal Navy as the preeminent maritime force on earth. In short, it was a strategic disaster for Germany.
Given these new military realities, Bethmann-Hollweg was desperate to reach an agreement with London that would allow Germany a free hand to deal with a vengeful France. The German chancellor needed to perform a diplomatic sleight of hand that even his famous predecessor Otto von Bismarck would have admired: Offering London enough enticements to seduce it to leave the entente alliance it had formed with France and Russia. The gemanophile secretary of state for war in the Asquith government in London, Viscount Haldane, was sent on a secret mission to Berlin, February 8-12, 1912, to see if this early form of arms control could be achieved.
In retrospect, it is hard to see any way in which the Haldane mission could have ended in success, as it would have required Britain to completely overturn its foreign policy of the past decade in order to reach a new and definitive understanding with Germany. But the diplomatic initiative was killed at birth, largely owing to the opposition of von Tirpitz, who narrow-mindedly was not about to allow his life’s work to be dismantled. Von Tirpitz opposed any change in Germany’s ambitious naval policy. By this point, the promised fallacy had completely clouded the judgment of Germany’s sea lord.
Meeting alone with the kaiser and von Tirpitz, Haldane proposed that to end the naval arms race, both sides had to agree to voluntarily limit the number of ships—particularly dreadnoughts—they were allowed to build. Such an outcome would have secured British naval superiority into the medium term, and tensions would have dissipated.
However, this ambitious diplomatic gambit was stillborn. The day before Haldane arrived in Berlin, the kaiser chose to present another ambitious new naval bill to the German Parliament, purposely sending precisely the wrong message to London about Germany’s future intentions.
When they finally met, Wilhelm offered to Haldane that Germany would slow construction of its navy, but not halt it. Crucially, he linked this concession to an agreement by both sides not to join with any combination of powers directed against the other, both promising to remain neutral if the other was forced into war.
In essence, the obviously not-up-to-scratch deal amounted to Germany agreeing to slow the naval arms race if Britain relinquished its vital alliances with France and Russia. While Asquith’s government in London was prepared to make some limited concessions to Berlin to satisfy German colonial aspirations in Africa, it was obviously completely against Germany’s linkage of merely slowing the naval arms race in return for discarding its highly advantageous alliances.
This otherworldly German offer to the British amounts to the Waterloo of von Tirptiz’s entire naval policy. The whole strategic point of the German build up had rested on the hope that the naval arms race would force Britain to agree to some sort of strategic ‘grand bargain,’ whereby London would allow Berlin to dominate Europe in exchange for a German promise not to interfere with Britain’s colonies.
Such a reading of London showed absolutely no understanding of the most basic of strategic precepts that have guided British foreign policy since time immemorial: To remain strategically secure, Britain must never let any one continental power (be it Louis XIV, Napoleon, the kaiser, or later, Hitler) dominate the whole of Europe.
As such, Britain’s historical strategy was always to ally with the smaller continental powers, balancing against any would-be hegemons. Britain was not about to throw away this guiding light of its strategic culture on the anaemic German promise to slow down a naval arms race London had already won.
Far from cowing Britain into submission, as von Tirpitz and the kaiser had hoped, all the naval arms race had done was to alarm Britain into putting its usual European strategy into practice, allying in this case with the French and the Russians to prevent German continental domination. With the abject failure of the Haldane mission, von Tirpitz simply returned to his promised land strategy and began another counter-productive round of ship building, further confirming British suspicions. Catastrophic war was not far away.
Von Tirpitz was to perform one last major strategic disservice to his country. As World War I ground into the bloodiest of stalemates, he advocated the use of unrestricted submarine warfare to bring England to its knees. This new promised land strategy merely succeeded in bringing the antagonised United States into the war, decisively shifting the correlation of forces in the entente’s favour. Falling out with Wilhelm over the restrictions he had sensibly placed on the U-boat campaign, von Tirpitz was shocked when his resignation of March 15, 1916, was accepted.
In 1917, von Tirpitz helped found the Pan-Germanic, ultra-nationalist Fatherland Party, agitating for a military dictatorship to be formed around Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. Never learning his lesson, after the war von Tirpitz supported the far-right National People’s Party, sitting for it as a member of the Reichstag between 1924-1928, though he never regained his pre-war eminence.
Von Tirpitz finally died in Munich on March 6, 1930, having unwittingly presided over the destruction of his country, due to his slavishly following the pernicious promised land strategy on more than one occasion. It is well that political risk analysts remember the doleful story of this talented man as a cautionary analytical tale; manufacturing game-changing strategies cannot be relied on, often leading to outright calamity.