ABSTRACT
From the last decade of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War I, the major powers of the world were characterized by growth, competition, and the expansions of their activities and interests. In Europe a rapidly growing beta nation – Germany – was challenging Britain – an alpha empire and the global hegemon. Defeated by Germany in the early 1870s, Britain’s traditional enemy, France, was moving closer to the hegemon, its former adversary. In the United States, Americans were watching their own country’s ‘manifest destiny’ unfold offshore in Cuba, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, elsewhere in the Western hemisphere, and as far away as the Philippines (and into China). Minor intersections with Japanese interests in the Pacific were probably harbingers of more violent collisions to come. European leaders on both sides were already cognizant of the United States as a candidate major power; they tended to underrate US capabilities which, on a number of dimensions, were overtaking those of both Germany and Britain.
