The plausible treaty: cap individual ships, not fleets

Ratios and limits on ship numbers are discarded because Britain would demand superiority and every navy would invoke different geographic needs. A narrower agreement could define standard displacement so that imperial cruising fuel and feed water did not count, then cap the largest ship and gun permitted. Roosevelt and Tillman might both accept predictable unit costs for different reasons, while Britain could reduce the expense of repeated design escalation. Because there is no aggregate limit, lower ship categories become easy to evade simply by calling a large vessel a light battleship.