Since Churchill re-used his turn of phrase from a speech of 1912 in his very popular books written after the First World War it seems likely to me Holger Herwig consciously or unconsciously quoted him when he wrote his own book in 1980.
It is of course arguable that if Germany had quickly conquered France and Belgium in 1914/15 and stripped them of their colonial possessions to make Wilhelm's desired world empire, then a fleet to defend those vast, widely-spaced additional overseas colonies would be desirable/necessary. However that would mean the plan for creating that empire through aggressive war against the European neighbours was already in place when the Naval Laws were enacted at the very beginning of the century. It is interesting to speculate how long the Netherlands would have been permitted to maintain its neutrality after a German victory in the west, since they too had a clutch of colonies which Wilhelm would have considered "desirable places".
In essence it all boils down to a moral question whether one considers the rapacious methods used to create empires like the British, French and Spanish in the 16th and 17th centuries were still acceptable in the 20th. Which is way off topic.
All the best
wadinga