U.S.–China Tensions in the Shadow of 1914

Implications of Paul Kennedy's "The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism" on the U.S. and China

From 1860 to 1914, the rise of the German state, and its consolidation of power in Europe and abroad, challenged Britain’s role as the geo-political superpower. This challenge deteriorated the relationship between then nations, fraying what looked liked strong bonds, until, in 1914, both nations risked rolling the iron dice. They entered into what Churchill described as “another Thirty Years’ War” that only ended in 1945.

What can we learn from the events that drove the British and German nations to war in 1914? In 1980, Paul Kennedy set out to examine why these two nations with shared royal bloodlines, cultural ties, and economic interdependence came to fight the “War to end all wars.” In examining the slow slide towards the First World War, Kennedy found the normal explanations of interstate relationships insufficient. Instead, Kennedy expanded the understanding of international relations by combining an examination of the cultural, economic, political, and social elements of Britain and Germany in his analysis and identified five key areas of friction that corrupted their relationship. 1) economic competition, 2) a naval arms race, 3) the Boer War, 4) media and popular opinion, and 5) political ideology.

Why am I writing about a 45-year-old analysis of Anglo-German relations leading up to a war that happened 111 years ago? One reason is that Kennedy’s analytic framework helped to shape the study of international diplomatic and political history since the 1980s. His analytic style influenced Christopher Clarks’ Sleepwalker: How Europe Went to War in 1914 and Ira Hotta’s Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. He also worked with and influenced seminal modern intellectuals such as John Lewis Gaddis, Niall Ferguson, Ian Shapiro, and Charles Hill. Kennedy’s academic importance aside, his work provides analytical tools that help identify the political, cultural, economic, and social issues at the root of interstate relations.

Heuristics, economic interconnectedness, and Rejection

Often, when discussing international relations commentators use the capitals, London and Berlin, D.C. and Beijing, or economic centers, Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, as stand-ins for the nations. The use of these names implies a similarity that is artificial. It implies that Shenzhen is the Chinese Silicon Valley, but this is not true. It is a shortcut to help describe a complex relationship. In analyzing other cultures, this name switching heuristic stripes details out and masks frictions that exist between nations and cultures. Kennedy breaks with these shortcuts and tries to discover the root causes of antagonism that helped to drive the world to war and offer us perspective on our current environment.

In many ways, Britain is a good stand in for the U.S. Both are industrialized, global, financial, and military powers. While Germany—a rising power with a large land force and increasing production capability—is a stand in for China. This is not perfect. There are similarities between the nations that offer us a chance to predict how the relationship could devolve into conflict. But, even more compelling are the differences that offer a potential to arrest the inexorable march towards war.

The U.S.’s role in the 1980s and through the unipolar period resembles Victorian Britain’s role. Both had unrivaled positions in the world and enjoyed economic power at a level that is restricted to the nation at the center of global finance. These similarities offered the U.S. and British political classes a stable theory of international relations, regardless of which party was in power. Meanwhile, Bismarck and Wilhelm’s Germany, as a neophyte, focused on external expansion, internal stability, and industrial modernization. This mirrors post-Mao China. During Deng Xiaoping’s reign, China focused on external expansion of its economic system and building its military capabilities, while aiming to cement the Party’s position by securing internal stability. In both cases, the rising power’s external expansion begins to upsets the established geopolitical system.

The economic interconnectedness and rivalry between Britain and Germany in some ways mirrors that of the U.S. and China today. Kennedy claims trade between Germany and Britain was overwhelmingly complementary and not competitive. Britain bought largely raw goods from Germany, finished them, and then re-exported the goods. In many ways, this matches the economic divide today, where the U.S. has moved low margin production to China and focuses on high margin production—namely tech and defense products. Kennedy’s insights into the English and Germany economies could apply to U.S. and Chinese economic analysis today.

Even at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, the massive imbalances in Britain's visible trade were being covered by the earnings from shipping, insurance, banking and especially the receipts from foreign investment; in other words, the real growth areas in her economy were already in the 'service' industries of the City of London (and also in commercial retailing). Germany, by contrast, represented a much 'tighter' economy, less dependent upon world commerce, possessing a far less acute 'gap' in visible trade, still investing heavily in large-scale industries at home rather than in public utilities or government bonds abroad, with more state control over, and intervention in, such important areas as railways, banking and tariffs, and with private industry itself becoming ever more cartelised and concentrated.

(Italics added)

Germany of course impacted the British economy. German steel exports challenged British steel and German industry and banking challenged British dominance on continental Europe. However, much as the U.S. has benefited from allies purchasing their goods abroad, Britain could rely on purchases from its colonies to power its domestic economy and absorb most of this economic impact. Kennedy’s work highlights that economic interconnectedness is not enough to avoid conflict. Perhaps that is truer during the economic decoupling we are currently experiencing. But, it also shows that great power’s economies evolve towards higher-margin service economies overtime. If this is a natural movement then the expansion of military power is a better barometer of antagonism.

In 1889, the British began building a Navy large enough to defeat both the French and Russian Navies. The British passed their Navy Defense Act in conjunction with laying aside a German request for a military alliance. This rejection, along with Britain’s place as the top world power, caused Germany to focus on building a navy specifically to British sole control of the seas.

[Grand Admiral and State Secretary of the Navy] Tirpitz's overriding motivation was not technical, but political: to create, as he himself put it, a 'political power factor' against England. This itself stemmed from his fundamental conviction that an Anglo-German conflict was, in the long term, unavoidable. This was an assumption which Wilhelm occasionally seems to have accepted; but at many other times, because of his mixed feelings as a 'half-Englishman', he gave indications that nothing would suit him better than for the British and German navies to rule the seas together. And, as a middle position between war and alliance, he most clearly felt that possession of a large navy by Germany would gain him the respect and Ebenbürtigkei which the proud yet practical British only paid to powerful states. In this aim, of course, Tirpitz's new strategy appeared ideal.

This mirrors headlines in U.S. and China’s relationship. The U.S. Navy’s ability to sail the Taiwan Strait at will and stop Chinese belligerency against Taiwan in the 1990s showed China the need for a strong navy. As of March 2025, China produced 53% of the world’s commercial ships. China has also expanded its territorial claims and enlisted its maritime militia to enforce those claims, showing a willingness to deputize “commercial” vessels as tools of national power. Similarly to the British, U.S. leadership is calling for investment in rebuilding its ship building capacity (while simultaneously placing barriers to international shipping that decrease the need for those ships.) The is a key difference in this analogy is Germany never achieved its goal. They never overtook the British in navy or commercial ship production. Would Wilhelm’s Germany have earned their much-sought Ebenbürtigkeit had they seized the naval reins as readily as China has?

Proxy War, Public Perception, and Miscalculation

The Boer War captures the tensions Britain and Germany faced over their colonies. The Kaiser’s open support for the Boers and the German, French, and Russian isolation of the British diplomatically during the conflict, fed the British narrative of a growing German problem. This was a late-stage colonial conflict and proxy war that Germany tried to use to upset British colonial power in Africa. While the competition between the U.S. and China is not colonial, the friction at the heart of Taiwan is a challenge to the security guarantees that underpin American alliances in the Pacific and globally. America is reacting to China’s challenge much as the British did to German interference in its colonial system, by increasing domestic rhetoric against the challenger. Kennedy describes British media and public’s reaction to German interference in the Boer War as:

Most Britons learnt of [German] hostility [over the Boer War] from reading their daily papers and other magazines, however, and it may have been precisely because the 'serious' press illustrated this anglophobia so fully that observers in London such as Metternich, Eckardstein and Mensdorff were struck by the change of moods towards Germany in the socially select circles with which they came into contact.

Saunders, as is well known, conceived it to be his duty to report every manifestation of anti-British feeling, so that the influential readership of The Times would take notice of this new challenge: not for nothing did Bülow describe him and Chirol as being among 'the most dangerous Englishmen for us', since they knew 'from personal observation how sharp and deep is the German dislike of England', But, with few exceptions, readers of the other British papers were given a similar impression: by April 1900, the Spectator had abandoned its earlier warmth for Germany and was publishing articles with such titles as 'England's Real Enemy'; and the Liberal Imperialist Daily Chronicle doubtless made British breakfast-times uncomfortable by its full descriptions of the anglophobic cartoons in German dailies and weeklies

The caustic rhetoric creates a self-fulfilling prophesy. Domestic media increasingly spills over into international relations. For Germany, this weakened their position in British eyes in ways that hurt their attempts at diplomacy after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. The Trump administration’s current approach and China’s “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” present day examples of domestic messaging issued abroad that impacts public perception. This rhetoric compounds crises and raises the potential for miscalculation.

Distrust and miscommunications lay at the heart of a possible crisis sparking conflict between the U.S. and China. Despite the rise in Anglo-German antagonism from 1870 until 1914, it was Gavrilo Princip’s pistol shots in Sarajevo that set the world ablaze. However, the power competition supplied the kindling. What would a non-linear event that sets the U.S. and China on the course of war look like? In 2001, a U.S. Navy EP-3 and a Chinese JP-8 collided in the sky above Hainan Island, killing the Chinese pilot. The incident saw an increase in Chinese nationalism and negative views of the U.S. Today, a similar incident could quickly spiral into a game of brinksmanship as each nation attempts to assert their sovereignty and address concerns of their citizens.

The ideological divides of each rival show how deep the similarities between our paired nations run. Britain’s relative strength internationally allowed it to develop a democratic tradition with multiple parties vying for power in the nation. The same is true for the U.S. Both nations saw democracy as a strength. However, Bismarck, and later Deng Xaioping, would disagree. In a sentiment that Deng would echo in his “Four Pillars” speech, Bismarck believed Britain’s democratic “instability” prevented the development of a military alliance between Germany and Britain. Much in the same way that Deng believed in socialist democracy that supported the Party’s rule. China’s “Beijing Consensus” mirrors autocratic Germany’s ability to move as it sees fit regardless of the whims of its electorate. This dichotomy bred distrust that miscommunications compounded.

Kennedy’s analytic framework is robust and requires a high degree of cultural understanding to use properly. The U.S. is underinvested in this space. While China’s second language of choice is English and they consume some American products and media, the same is not true in reverse. The cultural gap, compounded by national media, is wide. America needs to invest in understanding the culture that underpins China’s decision-making so it can identify frictions and assert its goals in a more impactful manner.

Short Falls of Kennedy’s Analysis Today

There are core differences between 19th Century Anglo-German relations and present-day U.S.-Chinese relations that Kennedy’s analysis does not account for. Since 1945, the emergence of coherent international political and trade organizations—The U.N. and WTO—and the spread of nuclear weapons create a demonstrably different landscape than Britain and Germany faced. Can international organizations reduce trade frictions and promote peace? Perhaps, but the U.S.’s use of economic tools against Russia, attempts by China to empower BRICS, and the imposition of President Trump’s tariffs indicate these economic systems are weakening. But, the limit of their strength remains unknown. The more pressing question as friction rises between two global powers is: does the threat of mutually assured destruction limit the chance of direct confrontation between nuclear armed powers? I write this as India and Pakistan have exchanged artillery fire, shot down aircraft, and continue to escalate militarily. I think the answer is clearly unknowable, but it is not no, so we must assume there are scenarios where the U.S. and China could see it in their national interest to fight. Perhaps the role nuclear weapons play in interstate aggression is to limit the strategic aims of the combatants. I am not sure a nation will use military power to overthrow another nuclear power. This is same logic of nuclear regime protection that underpins Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons.

The parallel between Kennedy’s Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism and the U.S.-China tensions are stark. Kennedy’s framework offers a way to understand how the relationship got to this point. While it does not have predictive power it does offer insights into the road that leads to conflict. The similarities are not perfect. But, they offer an escape from the path the European powers took into the Great War. Learning from this framework offers a chance to avoid blindly repeating the mistakes of the past.