Re-Visiting the Schlieffen Plan

What best explains the German General Staff’s decision to go to war in 1914? Was Alfred von Schlieffen’s war plan a self-fulfilling prophecy that pushed the Triple Entente to balance together against Germany? This article argues that the best, most recent scholarship concerning the impact of pre-war German military planning depicts a situation in which not one, but a multitude of of causal factors led Germany to go to war in 1914. The most compelling scholarship illustrates that the primary factors that led Germany to war include: the culture of nationalism, militarism, and the ideology of the offensive that was prevalent in the General Staff; pessimism about the prospect of victory in the future and optimism about victory in the present (preventive war thinking); perception about the strength and unity of the Triple Entente; the psychology and cognitive biases of German War planners; incoherence of strategic planning and organizational politics; and last, the idea that “grand strategy in this era was a three-level game in which the need to cobble together working coalitions on the domestic and alliance levels often seemed more pressing than even the life-and-death threats posed by foreign competitors.”[1]