The Royal Navy held a numerical advantage over any single European rival, which made smaller individual ships easier to accept in that context. Japan and the United States posed a harder problem. Germany and Italy had already become dictatorships, the United States had a far-right movement, and planners on both sides could not assume that Britain would remain politically unchanged forever. Both navies therefore had to examine an Anglo-American war as a remote worst-case contingency. A warship might serve through political alignments very different from those present when it was designed.
Notable Point · 4:07-5:12
Designing for an unlikely Anglo-American war
British destroyer design covered likely European opponents and the remote possibility of fighting the larger ships of Japan or the United States.