But the fault lies not with the Germans alone. The British were never willing to pay the Kaiser’s price for calling off Tirpitz’s challenge. During the 1912 Haldane mission to Germany, Britain could have gotten limits on the High Seas Fleet in return for a British pledge of neutrality in a Franco-German war. “The Germans were willing to make a naval deal in return for a neutrality statement,” writes British historian Niall Ferguson, “[I]t was on the neutrality issue that the talks really foundered. And arguably it was the British position which was the more intransigent.”
