Once countries get caught in an arms race their acquisitions tend to get out of hand. I don’t think England or France was going to poach Germany’s colonies, and the Germans didn’t need to build a navy that could potentially challenge Britain’s naval supremacy to deal with local colonial insurgencies. Building a navy that was big enough and powerful enough to take on Britain was precisely the one thing that would win Germany Britain’s enmity.
After Britain backed France in the First Moroccan Crisis which almost kicked off a European war that no one was really ready for, the Germans didn’t have much choice other than starting to arm with the Brits as prospective enemies. If the Brits had stayed out of the German-French confrontations, the Germans probably could have gotten by with a much less threatening navy to deal with the French and Russians.
The buildup was proven to be the correct course of action when the British fleet forced the Germans to back down in their confrontation with the French in the Second Moroccan
Crisis 5 years later.
And the German policy was never to match the British. The plan was for a fleet 2/3 as powerful as the British, with which they had to face the French and Russians as well (When war broke out, they were actually a little ahead of this, but the British construction after the outbreak of war greatly exceeded the Germans. The Austrians weren’t much help; they had 4 dreadnaughts and 9 pre-dreadnaughts by the beginning of World War I, while the Turkish fleet was such a joke that the Germans had to give them 2 ships to patrol the Black Sea. (The French had 4 and 15, respectively; the Russians were in slightly better shape than the Turks.)