Edwardian Britain, and Europe before World War I more broadly, produced a disproportionate number of memorable figures. Perhaps this is because their outstanding features are thrown into stark relief by our foreknowledge of the looming catastrophe. In the first decade of the 20th century, a rising generation of talented newcomers encountered the last vestiges of an aristocratic ruling class that had previously managed the British Empire from above. This was the era of a young Winston Churchill, but also of Lloyd George, the son of a Welsh schoolteacher and future wartime prime minister.
One such talented newcomer was John “Jacky” Fisher, who began his Royal Navy career as a midshipman and rose to the exalted rank of first lord of the Admiralty, transforming British naval doctrine in the process. If you were to pick one person who embodied the changes wrought by industry, science, and technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fisher would be a reasonable choice. When he entered the Royal Navy, sailors still practiced reefing sails and cutlass drills and endured punishment by flogging. As first sea lord, Fisher would oversee the introduction of steel-clad, turbine-powered behemoths to a fleet that had ruled the Age of Sail.
Fisher is best remembered for launching HMS Dreadnought, the first of the all-big-gun battleships and an instigating factor in the Anglo-German arms race. This new design was supposed to revolutionize naval warfare, but its dominance was short-lived, a victim of even more disruptive technologies such as torpedoes, mines, and aircraft. Fisher’s true legacy, and the reason he remains relevant today, is his strategic insight: He was the first British leader to grasp that an overstretched Royal Navy must ruthlessly consolidate to meet the rising threat of Wilhelmine Germany. Faced with a similar strategic dilemma in the South China Sea, American policymakers should consider Fisher’s example.
In 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s “Diamond Jubilee,” the Royal Navy’s reach was truly global. Eight first-class battleships guarded the English Channel, but a further 10 patrolled the Mediterranean, and three were reserved for the Far East station. Single battleships and their accompanying escorts would regularly deploy to other strategic points across the globe. This was the posture of a self-assured naval power, confident that it could overmatch rivals in several different theaters of war.
Even into the 20th century, British admirals spoke of maintaining a “two-power standard,” meaning the Royal Navy would always match or exceed the strength of its two closest rivals. This assumption was challenged by several unwelcome developments: the rise of regional powers such as Japan and the United States, which could not threaten British dominance singly but taxed the Royal Navy’s resources, and the naval ambitions of a newly unified Germany, which possessed the industrial wherewithal to challenge British supremacy at sea.
In matters of gunnery, personnel, and strategy, Fisher was intent on modernizing the Royal Navy, and his response to imperial overstretch was at least as radical as the changes he oversaw in ship design. Fisher described his own career as a constant struggle against “the way it has always been.” By the end of his tenure as first sea lord, he had decisively won the battle: From 1904 to 1907, the Royal Navy was transformed from colonial policeman to North Sea watchdog.
Battleships tell the story. In 1904, eight were stationed with the Home Fleet, eight in the English Channel, 12 in the Mediterranean, and five in the Far East. By 1905, no battleships were assigned to the China Station, while 17 battleships were deployed to the Channel Fleet, with a further eight in the Atlantic and eight in the Mediterranean. To help pay for this shift, and his concurrent shipbuilding program, Fisher ruthlessly culled the obsolescent colonial cruisers that had once been the sinews of Victorian gunboat diplomacy.
The change in British strategic posture necessitated a diplomatic revolution. An Anglo-Japanese naval agreement was renewed and extended to free up more cruisers and escorts, most of which were transferred to the suddenly preeminent Channel Fleet. In the late 19th century, British naval planners were fixated on a possible Franco-Russian alliance in the Mediterranean that could threaten the empire’s colonial lifelines. The 1904 Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, though not a formal military alliance, relieved this pressure by resolving colonial disputes and inaugurating a new era of military cooperation between the two rivals. In 1906, over howls of protest from naval traditionalists, Fisher was able to reduce the Mediterranean squadron from eight to six battleships.
Once set in motion, Great Britain’s pivot to the North Sea was irreversible. By 1912, Fisher was no longer running the Admiralty, but the accelerated German shipbuilding led to the further consolidation of British warships in home waters and a tacit understanding with the French, who promised to protect Great Britain’s Mediterranean interests in exchange for assurances that their vulnerable northern coasts would not be left exposed. When war came in 1914, the formidable German High Seas Fleet was bottled up in port and the English Channel lifeline was safe because Fisher and his acolytes had reshaped British grand strategy in the space of a decade.
The parallels between the United Kingdom before World War I and the U.S. of today are obvious and ominous. As with the Royal Navy and Wilhelmine Germany, the U.S. faces the prospect of a naval clash against a great power rival with industrial and military capabilities that match or exceed our own. For Fisher and Great Britain, the North Sea was the vital theater of conflict. For the U.S., it may be Taiwan and the South China Sea.
In an era of drones, stand-off munitions, and cyberwar, strategic focus can no longer be quantified by tallying up the number of capital ships in a given theater, but symptoms of imperial overstretch are increasingly obvious. According to the New York Times, in the event of a war with China, the U.S. would run out of certain precision missiles in less than a week. Our defense industrial base produces 15,000 artillery shells per month, which sounds impressive until you consider that the Ukrainian military currently expends nearly 7,000 shells per day. Airborne Early Warning and Control, once an American specialty and a key ingredient in modern air superiority, has been enthusiastically adopted by the Chinese, who have double the number of airframes available to monitor the skies around Taiwan.
Other warning signs would be recognizable to naval strategists from Fisher’s era. Although the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered supercarriers still dominate global sea lanes, the Department of Defense predicts that China will have 150 more warships than the U.S. within five years. Perhaps not coincidentally, President Xi Jinping has reportedly instructed the Chinese military to plan for an invasion of Taiwan by 2027. As for the Navy’s prized carriers, they may be fated to play the same role of Fisher’s beloved Dreadnought, a fabulously expensive legacy weapons system rendered obsolete by new technologies.
Ironically, the U.S.’s current posture is roughly the opposite of Fisher’s strategic design. Where Fisher and his successors relentlessly focused on the threat in the North Sea, the U.S. maintains an array of global commitments unmatched by any great power since the late Victorian zenith of the British Empire. From arming Ukraine to guarding against a resurgence of the Islamic State in Syria to less publicized military commitments in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S. has unwittingly adopted the approach favored by Fisher’s rivals in the British Foreign Office, who refused to accept that the German threat took precedence over the empire’s far-flung outposts.
Great Britain’s abandonment of “splendid isolation” provided real strategic dividends to the Royal Navy, which was able to offload responsibilities in the Pacific and the Mediterranean to Japanese and French squadrons. The U.S. already has a global network of alliances, but burden-sharing is notably absent from many of these arrangements. Taiwan, the likeliest target for Chinese military aggression, spends less per capita on its own defense than the U.S. American military support for Ukraine dwarfs that of its NATO allies, which are unlikely to involve themselves in a conflict in the South China Sea, anyway. German rearmament has stalled, new NATO members Finland and Sweden aren’t going to fight for Taiwan, and French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Beijing suggests that European governments will pursue their own line on China. Great Britain’s pre-World War I alliances relieved pressure on the Royal Navy. Ours only seem to add to our strategic burden.
It’s not that the U.S. doesn’t spend on defense. We just don’t spend wisely or well. Once again, Fisher’s example is instructive. By scrapping older warships fit only for colonial service — a “miser’s hoard of useless junk,” in his words — Fisher actually reduced British naval expenditures by 3.5 million pounds from 1904 to 1905, freeing up more resources to counter the German threat. The modern American equivalent of the Royal Navy’s obsolete colonial gunboats is the bloated defense contracts, legacy weapons systems, and billions spent on counterinsurgency and brush-fire conflicts from Syria to the Horn of Africa. Focusing on China would clean out the Augean stables of the military-industrial complex by prioritizing weapon systems that actually matter.
Appeasement, Adolf Hitler, and World War II are the most common reference points in American foreign policy debates, but the years leading up to World War I offer more relevant lessons. The U.K., once unchallenged on the world stage, faced a rising power with the industrial, scientific, and technological means to challenge its preeminence. Just as Germany was the U.K.’s largest trading partner before the war, the U.S. and China are economically and culturally intertwined. Before COVID-19, Chinese exchange students were common sights on U.S. campuses. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the driving force behind Germany’s naval building program, sent his daughters to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Free traders and China doves argue that such links are a barrier to major conflict. History suggests otherwise.
War between the U.S. and China is not inevitable, but grand strategy is supposed to prepare us for worst-case scenarios. At the moment, America’s global posture is uncomfortably close to the approach once advocated by the British Foreign Office, which was obsessed with peripheral commitments and oblivious to the rise of a peer competitor. Fisher understood the fundamental problem with this approach: If you try to be strong everywhere, you won’t be strong where it really counts.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
