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It is not clear that the British respected pre-World War I Germany; it is clear that they feared it, and armed against it. As Winston Churchill said, when the magnitude of the German naval construction program became clear, “the politicians proposed [to build] four [new battleships every year], the admirals demanded six, and we compromised on eight.”

It is worth stepping back, and noting that all of these politicians and military officers were at best badly mistaken, and at worst criminally insane. Nearly ten million people would die in World War I. All of the continental European emperors whose ministers made war would lose their thrones as a direct result of the war, the British monarch alone surviving (the kings of Italy and Belgium also survived: their countries joined the winning Anglo-French side).

...To fight one set of wars at the start of the twentieth century to unify Serbs and Croats and to fight another set of wars at the end to dissolve the union and “ethnically cleanse” the region seems among the sickest of the jokes that History plays on human populations.

...no one remembered that Bismarck had never had any desire to escalate political conflict in the Balkans. Perhaps his second-best-remembered sentence is that: “There is nothing at stake [in the Balkans] that is worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”

So with the Archduke dead, with Austria having rejected the Serbian response to their ultimatum, mobilizing, and on the point of attacking Serbia, with Russia mobilizing...

At that point Germany attacked Belgium...

It was that stupid.

Why did Germany attack Belgium?

...Hence the first shots in what was a dispute between Austria and Serbia were fired on the German-Belgian border. The laughter of the guns began as Germany’s heavy artillery began destroying Belgian forts and killing Belgian soldiers and civilians.

And, indeed, since Fehrbellin, the odds are that first a Prussian and then a German army would be a fearsome and terrifying foe, greatly outpunching its weight on the tactical and operational level—but, as far as logistics, industrial mobilization, strategy, and grand strategy are concerned, a group that could be out-thought and out-fought by a committee of six-year-old children.

...10 million dead; 10 million maimed; 10 million lightly injured—out of major belligerent populations of some 100 million adult men.

-Brad Delong, Slouching Towards Utopia