In the decades before World War I, all the European powers had secret plans to defend against invasion or to make preemptive strikes against their enemies. In Germany, the main war plan was the Schlieffen Plan. This plan grew out of a German fear of encirclement. Increasingly cut off from the rest of Europe by French, Russian, and British alliances, by the early 1900s Germany was geographically and politically isolated. The Schlieffen Plan developed as a military solution to this predicament. This plan anticipated a future war in which Germany would be surrounded by France and Russia. It was designed to enable Germany to fight both nations, but to avoid doing so simultaneously. When World War I began, a version of the Schlieffen Plan was implemented, but in the stalemate that ultimately developed, a victory meticulously planned on paper would be impossible to achieve.

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