This essay draws lessons for great-power grand strategy from the
history of Great Britain and its effort to manage the hegemonic
power transitions that spawned World War I and World War II. It
focuses on two main issues. The first is the diplomacy of
managing power transitions. At the turn of the twentieth
century, Britain faced a rapidly changing strategic landscape.
London had to deal with the simultaneous rise of three major
powers – the United States, Germany, and Japan. The Boer
uprising in South Africa meanwhile added to the difficulty of
sustaining imperial commitments with limited resources. The
essay examines what went right and what went wrong as Britain
struggled to adjust its grand strategy to a rapidly changing
strategic landscape. With the United States, Britain practiced a
deft diplomacy that succeeded in replacing enmity with amity.
With Japan, Britain struck an alliance that constrained Japanese
ambition and protected British positions in the Pacific – but
that then lapsed after two decades.