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Japan's rise to the position of leading Pacific sea power in 1905 created a new strategic factor in international politics. By joining Great Britain Germany, and the United States in the circle of the world's leading sea powers, Japan forced those other powers to revise their diplomatic calculations and military strategies. The United States was especially affected, as its new rival in the Pacific Ocean necessitated the creation of plans for a possible second front. Until then, American naval planners had concentrated exclusively on potential enemies in the Atlantic Ocean, the most probable war scenario being an attack by one (or a coalition) of the European powers in the Western Hemisphere, in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. From 1905 on, however, the United States battleship fleet was supposed to deal with possible attacks from two sides--in the worst case, simultaneously.
For the shaping of imperial Germany's foreign policy, these factors--the "Japanese peril" and the American two-front dilemma--played an important role.(1) German diplomats constructed and reconstructed scenarios to influence United States policy: the threat of Japanese ascendancy in China and the Pacific; the "yellow peril" of Japanese immigration into California; the possibility of cooperation between the United States and Germany to counter Japan or, rather, to counter the Anglo-Japanese alliance existing since 1902; the danger to the United States of an alliance between Germany and Japan.(2) This last possibility was broached in the Zimmermann telegram of 1917, in which German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann offered an alliance to Mexico and Japan in order to deter the United States from entering World War I.
Although imperial Germany's "yellow peril" policy focused on conflict between the United States and Japan in the Pacific Ocean, the main motivation for it derived from Germany's political and strategic goals in the Atlantic Ocean. The German leadership viewed close transatlantic ties between Great Britain and the United States as the most serious obstacle to Germany's ambition of becoming a world power. Anglo-American estrangement, therefore, was the central purpose of Germany's "yellow peril" policy. This policy, however, did not advance German interests at all. Instead, it nourished Washington's distrust of Germany's long-term global strategy and eventually contributed to the United States declaration of war against Germany.
A certain irony lies in the fact...