Review of The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941. Robert Kagan. 2023. Kindle online sample. Section 1.
From book introduction:
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was one of the world’s richest, most populous, most technologically advanced nations.
It was also a nation divided along numerous fault lines, with conflicting aspirations and concerns pulling it in different directions.
AMERICANS WERE THE BENEFICIARIES OF A GLOBAL ORDER THEY HAD NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR MAINTAINING.
Many preferred to avoid being drawn into what seemed an ever more competitive, conflictual, and militarized international environment.
However, many also were eager to see the United States taking a share of international responsibility, working with others to preserve peace and advance civilization.
…
The story of American foreign policy in the first four decades of the twentieth century is about the effort “to adjust the nation to its new position without sacrificing the principles developed in the past,” as one contemporary put it.
This would prove a difficult task.
THE COLLAPSE OF BRITISH NAVAL POWER, COMBINED WITH THE RISE OF GERMANY AND JAPAN, SUDDENLY PLACED THE UNITED STATES IN A PIVOTAL POSITION.
American military power helped defeat Germany in the First World War, and the peace that followed was significantly shaped by a U.S. president.
But Americans recoiled from their deep involvement in world affairs, and for the next two decades, they sat by as fascism and tyranny spread unchecked, ultimately causing the liberal world order to fall apart.
America’s resulting intervention in the Second World War marked the beginning of a new era, for the United States and for the world.
The Ghost at the Feast shows both the perils of American withdrawal from the world and the price of international responsibility.
….
From book sample:
Power changes everything.
The United States at the end of the nineteenth century was in many respects the same country it had been a century earlier.
Its system of government was shaped by the same Constitution, albeit modified by the Civil War.
Its guiding principles were still based on those articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which Americans revered if not always practiced.
America’s favorable geography was the same, although American dominance of the North American continent was more complete.
Measured in wealth, land and resources, population, and potential military capability AMERICA’S POWER RELATIVE TO THAT OF OTHER NATIONS IN THE WORLD HAD GROWN SO GREAT AS TO CHANGE COMPLETELY THE WAY THE REST OF THE WORLD VIEWED THE UNITED STATES.
…
It also changed the way Americans viewed themselves, though less completely. William McKinley [President 1897~1901] declared the era of isolation over.
But most Americans were not much interested in change and, at the end of the nineteenth century, still held to old ideas about themselves.
AMERICANS STILL SAW THEIR NATION STANDING APART FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD, DIFFERENT AND ALSO SUPERIOR, AND BY AND LARGE THEY LIKED IT THAT WAY.
…
This perception was understandable.
America did stand apart, even in 1900, a virtual distant island in geopolitical terms, on a huge continent surrounded on two sides by vast oceans, thousands of miles from all the other great powers of the world.
Americans’ physical location had long given them unique advantages and a unique perspective.
First and foremost, it had given them both wealth and a remarkable degree of economic independence.
THE UNITED STATES BY 1900 HAD GROWN INTO THE WORLD’S LARGEST AND MOST DYNAMIC ECONOMY.
…
Some of this success was due to THE PARTICULAR AMERICAN STYLE OF CAPITALISM, THE OPEN AND HIGHLY MOBILE NATURE OF ITS SOCIETY, COMPARED TO THE MORE RIGID AND INHIBITING TRADITIONS AND CLASS STRUCTURES OF EUROPE.
American patent and commercial laws fostered invention, innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment, both domestic and foreign.
Many modern economists judge the biggest factor behind America’s breathtaking economic growth in the last decades of the nineteenth century was simply the availability of abundant natural resources.
…
Americans led the world in the production of copper, coal, zinc, iron ore, lead, and other valuable minerals.
They produced half the world’s oil and a third of its pig iron, silver, and gold.
AMERICA HAD RACED AHEAD OF THE BRITISH IN THE PRODUCTION OF STEEL AND COAL, THE TWO GREATEST MEASURES OF ECONOMIC POWER AT THE TIME, as well as in industrial manufacturing.
…
They produced more than half of the world’s cotton and corn.
They were also largely self-sufficient.
ALTHOUGH AMERICANS TRADED WITH THE OTHER LARGE ECONOMIES, THEY DID NOT DEPEND ON THAT TRADE in the way the other top economies, Britain and Germany, did.
Americans had the land and resources to feed themselves.
Their homegrown businesses produced the goods they needed and wanted, and the large population was rich enough to buy more than 90 percent of domestic production.
The other advanced economies depended on access to foreign markets and foreign sources of supply, and these requirements shaped their foreign policies.
Americans believed they did not have to rely on anyone but themselves, and they were mostly right.
…
This relative economic self-sufficiency complemented a historically unique geopolitical independence.
Of the large, industrializing nations of the world—Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japan—THE UNITED STATES WAS THE ONLY COUNTRY SURROUNDED ONLY BY MUCH SMALLER, WEAKER POWERS AND BY OCEANS.
The European great powers all lived on top of each other and therefore in a constant state of insecurity.
The Asian powers, either the formerly great, like China, or the aspiring to be great, like Japan, competed for control of land and resources with each other and also with the British, French, Russian, and, more recently, German empires.
…
Only Americans did not live in a highly contested strategic environment.
This was not due simply to fortune or to the allegedly “free security” afforded by Britain’s Royal Navy.
Americans had once shared the continent with the powerful empires of Britain, France, Spain, and Russia, but over the course of a century they had driven or bought them out and compelled their acceptance of U.S. hegemony through stubbornness, belligerence, and occasional aggression.
The task had been made easier by enduring geopolitical facts, however.
The other great powers’ main concerns were generally closer to home, thousands of miles from the New World.
Thus AMERICANS AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY FOUND THEMSELVES ENJOYING A LEVEL OF SECURITY OTHERS COULD NEVER SHARE, OR EVEN COMPREHEND.
(end of section 1)
… …
(Own comments)
“Americans still saw their nation standing apart from the rest of the world, different and also superior, and by and large they liked it that way.”
Both previous lonely isolationism and current reactionary interventionism are sad and wrong song.
U.S. must covertly and overtly infuse tHAT. Act not react. Extend Americanism not defend idealism.
Expansionism, not nativism, is the solution and answer.
(always some edits…)
We U.S. Real Republican HATrs must empower our brother and sister positive 47.5% happy-lovers HATrs in the countries where the people now flooding into the U.S. from to turn round squares and overthrow and suspend their 5% shapeless-form mafia downlooking kings who have been empowered by zeir 47.5% misery-wuvver (we’re united victims and victimizers) Omrondles-led and bled negatives.
People All over have the same abilities and potentialities.
To become successful and rich All We everywhere only need brainpower freed, strengthened and incentivized.
We and They see and know the reason so many are poor in dem depressed countries on Earth be the 5% shapeless-form in-power monopoly mafias rule, enabled by negative misery-wuvvers who want things ever-more miserable, zei wuv complaining not gaining.
The fundamental cause of the illegal immigration problem and oll the world’s maladies be We U.S. still-isolationist standing-around not yet living HATrs don’t accept the 47.5%-47.5%-5% HATomic philosophy reality fact and then act to spread tHAT All over here and everywhere, Earth and universe.
All tHAT above veracity and/or efficacy must forever be accepted by positive We and rejected by negative dem. But We’ll All go together.
(The Byrds/Pete Seeger song The Bells of Rhymney)
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