Review of The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941. Robert Kagan. 2023. Kindle online sample. Section 2.
On the eve of World War I the British ambassador, Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, had to explain to his puzzled colleagues AMERICANS LIVED ON A CONTINENT THAT WAS “REMOTE, UNCONQUERABLE, HUGE, WITHOUT HOSTILE NEIGHBORS.”
They therefore enjoyed an “unvexed tranquility,” free from the “contentions and animosities” that were part of the everyday existence of Europeans.
These unique circumstances had an impact not only on America’s foreign policies but on American society and governance.
The other powers had no choice but to spend large portions of their national incomes arming themselves for the constant possibility of war.
…
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 1900s:
-Russia’s peacetime army numbered almost 2,000,000
-Germany had 600,000 men under arms
-France had 575,000
-Austria-Hungary, a second-rank power, had 360,000
Even the British, who lived on an island and relied almost entirely on their navy, had over 200,000 men in their standing army.
The United States inhabited a territory almost as vast as Russia’s, and had the world’s third-largest population, yet its regular army at the end of the nineteenth century numbered only in the tens of thousands.
It was a “corporal’s guard,” as Theodore Roosevelt called it, barely sufficient to deal with Native American tribes on the western plains, the U.S. Army’s main post–Civil War mission.
Yet it seemed adequate for the nation’s defense because, as British intelligence officers judged at the time, whatever the size of the American army, “a land war on the American Continent would be perhaps the most hazardous military enterprise we could possibly be driven to engage in.”
…
Americans had recently invested more in their naval forces.
IN THE EARLY 1880S U.S. NAVY HAD BEEN NO BIGGER THAN THAT OF CHILE, and they had launched a sizable peacetime naval buildup—but again they built less and spent less than the leading naval powers.
The “New Navy” consisted of a handful of armored cruisers and eventually 7 modern battleships.
By comparison, in 1901 Britain’s Royal Navy had 50 battleships cruising the oceans, France had 28, Germany had 21, and even Italy had 15.
Like the army, the U.S. Navy was small in proportion to the nation’s wealth and size, even though it had to operate in two vast oceans and the Caribbean and protect thousands of miles of coastline.
Had there been any real challenge from another great naval power, the American fleet would have been dangerously inadequate.
But in the world as it was configured, the other powers were reluctant to expose themselves to their neighbors by sending their fleets thousands of miles away to take on the United States.
Even in the age of steam, distances still mattered.
…
Being geographically isolated Americans enjoyed far greater security than other great powers, even though they spent barely 1 percent of their national income on defense, a small fraction of what the great powers of the day spent.
LOW DEFENSE COSTS MEANT AMERICANS COULD SPEND THEIR MONEY ELSEWHERE AND KEEP TAXES RELATIVELY LOW.
It also meant less need for strong central government, less military bureaucracy, and less need for speedy and efficient decision-making.
…
Americans had less need to take foreign policy very seriously, and generally they didn’t.
Henry Cabot Lodge, who wished it were otherwise, admitted “OUR RELATIONS WITH FOREIGN NATIONS FILLED BUT A SLIGHT PLACE IN AMERICAN POLITICS” AND MOST OF THE TIME EXCITED “ONLY A LANGUID INTEREST.”
The political parties saw foreign policy problems as chiefly opportunities to score points, while Congress saw foreign policy chiefly as a constitutional struggle with the executive.
British officials liked to tease their American colleagues the United States was most fortunate “in being untroubled by any foreign policy.”
But as James Bryce, the British historian and long-serving ambassador to the United States, observed, this was a luxury Americans seemingly could afford.
The great powers of Europe had no choice but to maintain their systems of government “in full efficiency for war as well as for peace.”
But Americans could tolerate “the want of unity and vigour in the conduct of affairs by executive and legislature” because they lived in a world of their own and sailed “upon a summer sea.”
The United States also stood apart ideologically.
It was a young, democratic republic in a world still dominated by ancient hereditary monarchies and aristocracies.
…
At the turn of the century, Russia was ruled by Nicholas II, latest in the line of Romanov tsars going back to 1613.
WILHELM II, OF THE EIGHT-HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD HOUSE OF HOHENZOLLERN, WAS EMPEROR OF GERMANY AND KING OF PRUSSIA.
Franz Joseph I, a descendant of the eight-centuries-old House of Habsburg, was emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, and king of Bohemia.
Abdul Hamid II, the Sublime Khan and thirty-fourth Ottoman sultan, ruled in Turkey.
The Empress Dowager Cixi, former concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor of the Qing dynasty, ruled as regent in China.
The Emperor Meiji was the 122nd emperor of Japan.
Italy, a constitutional monarchy, was ruled by King Umberto I and then by his son Victor Emmanuel III, of the thousand-year-old House of Savoy.
…
In this world, THE UNITED STATES, A LITTLE OVER A CENTURY IN EXISTENCE, REMAINED A REVOLUTIONARY UPSTART.
The kaiser could still appeal to the other crowned heads of Europe to show the American democratic “rascals” that “Europe’s kings really stand together,” as he did in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War in 1898.
The kaiser’s grandmother agreed.
Queen Victoria was in her sixty-third year on the British throne.
Her father was born ten years before the American Revolution.
Her grandfather was George III.
The United States was not only governed differently, it was not even a “nation” in the way that the other great powers were.
Americans shared neither common blood nor an ancient rootedness in the soil.
At least in theory, ALL AMERICANS SHARED WAS A COMMON ALLEGIANCE TO THEIR WRITTEN CONSTITUTION AND A FIDELITY TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
This universalistic, ideological nationalism had been revolutionary when it first erupted on the scene in the late eighteenth century, and it remained revolutionary a century later. It would continue to shape Americans’ choices in foreign policy.
(end of section 2)
… …
(Own comments)
Section 2 240531
“[Because of being geographically isolated] Low defense costs meant Americans could spend their money elsewhere and keep taxes relatively low.
It also meant less need for strong central government, less military bureaucracy, and less need for speedy and efficient decision-making.”
Here we are an isolated planet, soon, as an Earthwide U.S. of World We will:
-have low military expenses
-have low taxes
-have smaller and less intrusive central government
-All be rich and much happier
…
Section 1 240529
“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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