From Japanese deterrence to German coercion

Japan's approach is presented as adding armored cruisers to the battle line so an attack on Japan would become expensive enough to discourage conquest. Tirpitz's scheme sought something more ambitious: to use German naval growth to control the relationship with Britain. A deterrent can succeed when an opponent decides that conquest is not worth the losses, while coercion requires that opponent to accept another state's preferred political outcome. That shift from defensive deterrence to offensive leverage made the policy more likely to trigger British countermeasures than compliance. Similar fleet arithmetic could therefore serve very different strategies.