Germany gambled on a Mexican alliance while trying to keep America neutral

Tuchman lays out the strategic logic behind Germany's proposal: German military leadership calculated that resuming unrestricted submarine warfare against Atlantic shipping, a policy they were about to reinstate, would likely provoke American entry into the war on the Allied side. Rather than simply accepting that risk, German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann tried to hedge against it by simultaneously offering Mexico a wartime alliance, financial support, and the promise of recovering territory lost in the nineteenth century, calculated to tie down American military resources on its own southern border if war came anyway. The plan reveals Germany's broader wartime gamble at that moment: German commanders believed unrestricted submarine warfare could strangle Britain into peace before American forces could be trained, shipped across the Atlantic, and meaningfully deployed, making the Mexican alliance a kind of strategic insurance policy in case that timeline assumption proved wrong. Takeaway: the telegram wasn't a random provocation — it was a calculated hedge against a war Germany already suspected it was about to provoke.