Consider the eye...
Open Treaties, openly arrived at.
A bird in the hand...
Eyes are unlikely things, they seem to rely on too many things happening just right to come about. Should one step fail... The League of Nations without the USA is a busted flush. Many realise this. And wait a minute... just who is it going to fall on to make it work if it comes to force?
Naval Intelligence has become aware that the Americans are reading our and others mail.
We have a treaty with Japan. It worked.
Let's just be a little less gullible about this Washington business.
Especially as we haven't actually killed either Germany or Russia and the Italians are becoming aware they didn't get anything out of fighting with us except a huge stack of dead and maimed.
Oh, and the majority of the fleet is obsolete, knackered or vulnerable. We need more dockyard jobs and where will the dockyards and gear cutters be after a 10 year building holiday? Who will invest in modern plant if they don't have anything to build?
A naval arms race might be undesirable at the moment, but neither is it desirable to wreck our fleet and industry.
Cui bono?
The USA's interests are not Great Britain's and Great Britain's interests are not the USA's.
Neither Britain nor Germany set out to go to war with one another. Britain was paying more attention to not going to war with France, Russia and Japan. They were the powers we paid attention to, they could directly threaten the Empire or the Metropolitan, just as Germany paid most attention to France and Russia for the direct threat they posed.
Ten years before the Kaiser marched into Belgium, an Anglo-German war was the stuff of fiction, and bad fiction at that. Tweaking Washington to address our interests in the East, our industrial and naval interests and the inevitable contingencies of Central Europe wont necessarily lead to an Anglo-American rivalry either but it is a feasible scenario.
Don't know how you would get an Anglo-American war though, there is no
need to march through Belgium to get at Japan.