American political, naval, and military leaders at the time understood the threat.
In 1970, German naval historian Holger Herwig published newly discovered turn-of-the-twentieth-century German contingency plans for war with America. The base plans called for the German fleet to sail toward America; directly in the summer, through Puerto Rico in the winter. Along the way they would meet and destroy the American fleet in battle. Then they would head to New York or Boston and bombard the cities. Follow-on iterations considered gathering ground troops for a proper invasion somewhere on the East Coast.
American political, naval, and military leaders at the time understood the threat. They made their own plans for a war with Germany, eventually called War Plan Black, explicitly designed to defend the Caribbean and homeland from German military aggression. Herwig’s discovery of the German plans was a bombshell. The New York Times published a front page article on his work. Then it was quickly forgotten, only to be rediscovered in 2002, and quickly forgotten again.
Perhaps these plans were so different from the actual wars fought between the United States and Germany that they come off like harebrained artifacts from the overheated imaginations of early general staffs. But in truth they represent a phase of a long political and military antagonism between the two nations, a perfect example of what we now call “great power competition.” That contest became the subject of Herwig’s Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889-1941 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1976), a forgotten book that is filled with insights on political and military motivations, intrigues, approaches, and, most importantly, the real stakes of great power competitions.
Unified in 1871, Germany stormed onto the world stage as a power amid the so-called Age of Imperialism. As latecomers to the game, they felt they had to play catch-up. Even Germany’s realpolitik chancellor Otto von Bismarck, initially skeptical of the value of overseas expansion, by the 1880s went along with the trend.
The Germans jumped into the European scramble for Africa, getting in wherever they could, eventually taking Togoland, Namibia, Cameroon, and Tanzania. By the mid-1880s, they expanded into the Pacific, looking for places unclaimed by Europeans or Americans or where Spain’s influence was falling. They gained control of parts of Samoa, New Guinea and many of the surrounding islands, eventually including the Carolines and Marianas. By the turn of the century, they had seized Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) in China.
This German expansion in the Pacific was what first put them at loggerheads with the Americans. In 1889, American and German naval forces nearly engaged in a battle over control of Samoa when a typhoon wrecked the contending fleets. An even more dangerous conflict came in the Philippines in 1898, when Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron won a decisive battle over the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. While determining what to do next in the Philippines, the Americans realized that other powers circled the Philippines like vultures. The Spanish might return, and the British, French, or Russians did send warships to the islands. But by far the most aggressive were the Germans.
The fleet under Admiral Otto von Diederichs was pointedly larger than Dewey’s. The German forces attempted to sneak past the American blockade. They tried to make favorable arrangements with Spanish ground forces that were still in possession of the city of Manila. They even put troops on the ground, testing to see how the Americans would react.
America ships twice put literal shots over the bows of German ships in the bay. A British naval captain helped by siding with the Americans to get the Germans to back down. The U.S. Army arrived to occupy Manila, and the Americans sent in more warships. The Germans ended the direct confrontation, but not their efforts for Pacific empire. Given the hostile environment, and unfortunately for the native Filipinos, the Americans at the time did not see a way to grant full independence to the archipelago. In the meantime, Dewey, now the most prominent U.S. naval officer of his day, developed a lifelong mistrust and enmity toward the Germans and their ambitions.
Not satisfied with their growing global empire in Africa and the Pacific, the German extended their ambitions to the Western Hemisphere. Kaiser Wilhelm II, German naval leaders, and German colonial societies believed that the future of Germany depended on establishment of bases and territories in Latin America and the Caribbean. From the 1870s on, they intervened militarily multiple times in Haiti, including bombarding Port au Prince in 1897. Among the places they coveted most was Venezuela, leading to a tense confrontation between the American and German fleets in 1902-1903 in which Dewey enthusiastically played a prominent role. Over the next decade plus, the Germans sought economic and territorial advantages in the revolutionary strife in Mexico.
The Germans were deadly serious about these efforts, as evidenced by the content military plans and prominence of the planners. The chief of staff of the German army was Alfred von Schlieffen. Alfred von Tirpitz was the state secretary of the German navy, and his chief of the Admiralty staff was Otto von Diederichs, Dewey’s rival from Manila Bay. As they explored options, it was Diedrichs who queried Schlieffen to see if ground troops were available for a follow-on invasion. Schlieffen averred—he famously had other plans of conquest in mind—but the stakes and intentions were clear.
In the following years, Germany focused more intently on their continental rivalries and at least superficially tried to temper the rivalry with the United States. In 1904, Kaiser Wilhelm II gifted a statue of Frederick the Great to President Theodore Roosevelt for placement outside the Army War College, then in Washington D.C. Of course there was to be no enduring amity, and the statue went into storage during World War I and again after World War II. It eventually made its way to the new war college location at Carlisle Barracks, where it sits, inconspicuously, today, a tangible artifact of the long and winding competition with the German second and third Reichs, that shared ambitions of world power, including in the Western Hemisphere, and explicitly at the expense of the United States.
The Germans deferred those Western Hemisphere ambitions for a time based on various crises closer to home, but they seethed under the surface. Such a perspective helps better explain how when conditions in World War I forced Imperial Germany to make war with America inevitable by returning to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, they coupled that approach with an attempted direct attack on the United States through Mexico with the Zimmermann Telegram (123-124). Likewise, Adolf Hitler’s almost casual declaration of war on the United States was part of a pattern of German disdain and resentment toward American power throughout some seventy years of competition. Politics of Frustration is an apt title.
The emphasis of all the key German players at first was on power as a matter of pride—Weltpolitik—great power for greatness’s sake.
Very clearly, Herwig described great power competition among great and rising nations, replete with diplomacy, border security, deterrence, military postures, shows of force, military plans, spy craft, and what we now call irregular warfare. But a closer look reveals something more than just power politics—equivalent states doing what they must to achieve greater security—and gets at the stakes of great power competition. Affairs of states are about more than just power. They are about the intended use of that power.
Herwig understood that. While he had plenty of critiques of the specific German approaches to the ongoing competition, he also is clear throughout about the motivations driving their efforts. The emphasis of all the key German players at first was on power as a matter of pride—Weltpolitik—great power for greatness’s sake. The tangible benefits of such greatness were an afterthought. That is, until they got colonies, and had to govern them and make them profitable.
For complicated reasons, the Germans adopted mercantilist, autarkic, closed, monopolistic, exclusive, and exploitative policies toward their empire. They established rigid political control of colonies and protectorates through taxation, currency, the media, and land and business ownership. They brutally extracted resources, and they instituted exclusive trade and, to the greatest degree possible, monopoly on shipping into and out of those colonies. Their resulting military plans and operations were highly aggressive, including the aforementioned plans for war with the United States. (Outside of Herwig purview, but not coincidentally, in the colonies, their policy aims led to harsh and eventually genocidal military operations to remove native opposition, most horrifyingly in German Southwest Africa.) These policies picked up a racialized aspect and altogether became the explicit motivation, even reason for being, of the Nazi Third Reich, with even more awful results.
The German worldview also exhibited a fair deal of mirror imaging. When it came to the Americans, they believed the Monroe Doctrine was just a hemispheric power play—asserting power for power’s sake. As such, Bismarck thought it was as arrogant as it was absurd. It infuriated Wilhelm II and most other German leaders throughout the period (72-80, 188).
One of the strengths of Herwig’s work is its comparative nature, even though he spends less time on the Americans. Given the German threat, it became clear once again that the Monroe Doctrine was not about American control of the hemisphere just to have control, although pride of power certainly played a part. It was foremost about denying new oppressive or controlling great power interventions in the hemisphere. Such interventions were and are, in Monroe’s original terms, “dangerous to our peace and safety,” and in Theodore Roosevelt’s updated conception, “to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.” In describing the American responses to the Germans, Herwig makes evident that in their sphere of influence and engagement with the rest of the world, Americans adopted policies based on their foundational and enduring values of freedom and opportunity. Herwig does not make the direct comparison beyond War Plan Black (102-109), but the resulting American war plans and military operations were dramatically different from the German ones. Like War Plan Black, they focused on wars to preserve, restore, or gain access, with military planning and operations oriented towards end states of productivity and development. Whatever the ugly American excesses of the long Philippines occupation, and there were plenty, it was a far cry from the deliberately imposed conditions in German-held territories.
That lesson is vital for today’s great power competition. Hostile great powers like Imperial and Nazi Germany are hostile not because they seek greater power, but because they intend to use that power to impose closed, autarkic, monopolistic, exclusive, exploitative systems. Hostile great powers now are a threat for the same reasons.
On the opposite side, the current “rules based international order” is not just another system of control. It is a reflection of the hard-earned orderly liberty so cherished by America and her allies: free markets, interconnectedness, open systems, fair competition, access, and production. Its destruction would be a catastrophe for the whole world.
Politics of Frustration is a timely reminder that great power competition is not now, and never has been, a game played by morally equivalent states. Nothing less is at stake than a future characterized by suffering and despair, versus one with opportunity and hope. We would do well to remember that, and say it out loud when we do.
Thomas Bruscino is a Professor in the Department of Military, Strategy, Planning and Operations at the U.S. Army War College and the Editor of the DUSTY SHELVES series.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of War.
Photo Description: An 1898 illustration from Die Gartenlaube depicting the ships of the German Cruiser Squadron in East Asia: Arkona, Prinzeß Wilhelm, Kaiserin Augusta, Kaiser (flagship of the 1st Division), Kormoran, Irene, Gefion, Deutschland (flagship of the 2nd Division). The image represents the aggressively positioned fleet commanded by Admiral Otto von Diederichs at Manila Bay.
Photo Credit: Illustration created by Willy Stöwer, prominent German maritime artist and illustrator during the Imperial period. Published by Ernst Keil via Wikimedia Commons
