After serving fourteen years in the State Department, Robert Kagan achieved prominence in the late 1990s as a leading “neo-conservative” advocate of a more forceful employment of US power to shape the world in accordance with American values, particularly through the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq as part of a more general attempt to promote democracy in the Middle East. Since then, Kagan has been an active contributor to public debate, authoring numerous articles and books on US foreign policy and current affairs generally. But, in parallel with these activities, he has been engaged in researching and writing an overall history of the entire course of US foreign policy from the colonial era on. The first volume, Dangerous Nation, published in 2006, concluded with the Spanish-American war of 1898,[1] and this succeeding volume covers the period from then until America’s entry into World War II.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 107
Robert Kagan, The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. ISBN 9781400095681.
Review by John A. Thompson, University of Cambridge
5 September 2024 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE107 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
After serving fourteen years in the State Department, Robert Kagan achieved prominence in the late 1990s as a leading “neo-conservative” advocate of a more forceful employment of US power to shape the world in accordance with American values, particularly through the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq as part of a more general attempt to promote democracy in the Middle East. Since then, Kagan has been an active contributor to public debate, authoring numerous articles and books on US foreign policy and current affairs generally. But, in parallel with these activities, he has been engaged in researching and writing an overall history of the entire course of US foreign policy from the colonial era on. The first volume, Dangerous Nation, published in 2006, concluded with the Spanish-American war of 1898,[1] and this succeeding volume covers the period from then until America’s entry into World War II.
Robert Kagan is a son of an eminent historian of ancient Greece (Donald Kagan), and The Ghost at the Feast, like its predecessor, is a serious work of history. The one hundred and twenty-three pages of notes testify to the extent and thoroughness of Kagan’s research, primarily in the enormous secondary literature bearing on his subject but also in some primary sources. Kagan’s engagement with the work of academic scholars is often impressive in its specificity and detail (the notes include the correction of errors or mis-statements in some of the works referred to), but this history is clearly also written for a wider audience and with a broader purpose in mind than the advancement of scholarly knowledge and understanding. Throughout both volumes, Kagan identifies ways in which America’s past behaviour not only throws light upon its more recent actions but also bears upon current debates. This is unquestionably history that points a moral.
In Dangerous Nation, Kagan argued that reinterpreting the history of US foreign policy was particularly important because of the “gap between Americans’ self-perception and the perceptions of others” that “has endured throughout the nation’s history….Even as the United States has risen to a position of global hegemony, expanding its reach and purview and involvement across the continent and then across the oceans, Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward passivity, indifference, and insularity.” In reality, Kagan maintained, Americans had sought to extend their sway ever since the colonial period when European observers had been struck by the “aggressive, immoderate, seemingly limitless expansionism of the Anglo-Americans.”[2] This urge acquired moral legitimation from the liberal republican ideology that became foundational for the new nation after the American Revolution and which served to justify the dispossession of both European powers and native peoples in North America as a liberating enterprise. Americans saw this ideology as universally applicable, Kagan emphasized, and he reinterpreted the often cited texts which are commonly taken to imply that its policy implications were geographically circumscribed. Highlighting the immediate political purposes that shaped President George Washington’s Farewell Address, he concluded that in the 1790s “nonentanglement was a selective tactic, not a grand strategy,” while thirty years later “the Monroe Doctrine propped open the door to further territorial expansion and staked a claim to American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.” The Doctrine’s author, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, “viewed the international system through an ideological lens,” notwithstanding the frequent quotation of his declaration that “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” by “twentieth-century realists”; the Americans who most often expressed a “realist” viewpoint in the nineteenth century, Kagan observed, were Southern defenders of slavery.[3] Whereas the young republic had been very conscious of its weakness, in the later nineteenth century Americans recognised that the nation’s remarkable economic growth had greatly enhanced its potential power to influence events beyond its borders. Although this led to only modest expansion of the nation’s specific foreign policy goals (apart from an isthmian canal), it did produce both a more demanding concern with the nation’s “honor, prestige, and respect in the international arena” and a greater sense of responsibility for overseas developments that Americans believed they had the capability to shape. (349, 391, 409-10). Both these factors contributed to popular support for the war with Spain in 1898, which Kagan saw as basically “the product of Cuban reality and American outrage over actual human suffering.”[4]
It is not difficult to see how this narrative, highlighting expansionism and belief in the universality of American values as central themes in US foreign policy, might be taken to show that the neo-conservative agenda was in accordance with its historic character, rather than being, as critics argued, contrary to the nation’s traditions and time-honored principles. The early chapters of The Ghost at the Feast continue to emphasize the extent of Americans’ active involvement with the world in the early twentieth century, in a way that involves some strained interpretations of the historical record. Thus, Kagan describes the Republican party as “the political home” for those who “believed the United States should assume new responsibilities commensurate with its new power” without mentioning Midwestern Republicans like Robert La Follette, who strongly opposed what they saw as imperialism, and he reads significance into the fact that in the presidential elections, 1900–1908, “Americans consistently chose the more internationalist of the two candidates,” when the more obvious explanation for this is that they were Republicans in years when that was clearly the majority party (29, 84). In fairness, however, Kagan does recognize most Americans’ lack of interest in overseas affairs at this time, and that “for the big global game the rest of the powers were engaged in…the United States was not a player and did not appear to want to be” (61, 68).
This concession to the traditional view of the United States’ detachment from international politics that Kagan so vigorously disputed in Dangerous Nation is the prelude to an account of the evolution of US policy between 1914 and 1941 that is broadly in line with an earlier historiography in its analysis and argument. In a constantly readable narrative of America’s response to World War I, Kagan picks his way sure-footedly through issues that have been the subject of much controversy over the years. Free from both the idolatry and the vitriol that President Woodrow Wilson has attracted, he correctly portrays Wilson as a pragmatic politician whose actions and policies were not an expression of his personal views or ideals but attempts to respond in a way that would command general public support to the pressures and dilemmas that arose from the unprecedentedly total European conflict. Rightly, Kagan emphasizes that the initial decision to remain neutral was unquestioned even by politicians with strong pro-Allied feelings like ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and was reinforced by a concern (expressed by Wilson) about the threat to domestic harmony presented by the conflicting sympathies of different groups of Americans (106-09).
Wilson’s failure to challenge the British blockade more strenuously has sometimes been seen as a departure from neutrality that led to the United States’ ultimate involvement in the conflict, but Kagan pertinently observes that the object of the German submarine campaign against merchant ships was not to ease the blockade but to cut the flow of American supplies to the Allies (114-16, 502-04). He also points out that the administration initially rebuffed the British Foreign Secretary’s pleas that the United States commit itself to joining a postwar organization to maintain the peace, and that Wilson changed his position only after the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 had raised the possibility that the United States might be dragged into the war (116, 155). Yet, in a striking example of Kagan’s distinctive interpretative cast, this momentous break with the long tradition of non-entanglement is recounted in two pages whereas the effect of the Lusitania sinking and such other examples of ruthlessness as aerial bombing and the use of poison gas in leading “most Americans” to see “the Germans” as “the villains and enemies of progress” receives a whole chapter (122-38). Kagan exaggerates both the breadth and the durability of this revulsion before 1917, which is a reflection of his desire to counter “modern accounts of World War I [that] have drained the conflict of moral content,” as well as of his general inclination to attribute the actions of the United States to the morally inspired attitudes of ordinary Americans (128).
Notwithstanding this, Kagan stresses that “it was Germany’s decisions, not Wilson’s that played the decisive role in bringing the two countries to blows”; indeed, in interpreting the President’s pleas in the winter of 1916–1917 for a compromise “peace without victory,” he adheres to the unsympathetic view of the British ambassador that Wilson was motivated, not by some idealistic goal, but by a desperate desire to bring the war to an end before the United States was forced into it by a German resort to submarine warfare (159-60). It was only after German U-boats started actually sinking American ships in March 1917 that Wilson (like his whole cabinet) concluded that war was the only choice, and so apparently did a large majority of Americans; Kagan points out that support for war, though “far from unanimous,” was greater than it had been in 1812 or 1861 (184-86). Once having made the decision, Wilson was committed to total victory, Kagan stresses; his Fourteen Points address of January 1918 “was widely misunderstood at the time by supporters and critics alike, as well as by later historians” as a “fleshing out of the ideas he had broached a year earlier in his ‘peace without victory’ speech,” when in reality its territorial terms would be accepted only by “a thoroughly defeated Germany” (202-04). This is a broadly persuasive argument, though Wilson’s later statements in advance of the peace conference were both more ambiguous and more fluid than Kagan suggests.
The other noteworthy feature of Kagan’s account of America’s belligerency is his emphasis on its decisive effect. While not all historians would rate the importance of its direct military contribution to the 1918 campaign as highly as he does,[5] Kagan is surely right that without America’s intervention there would have been little prospect of a German defeat. This, he stresses, made the United States a central part of the balance of power that shaped the peace settlement. And, unlike all the European belligerents, the United States came out of the war stronger rather than weaker than it had been before. Indeed, Kagan writes, “probably no [other] nation ever enjoyed the combination of wealth, power, and global influence that Americans wielded in the years following the Great War” (209, 215-16, 259-60, 263).
In marked contrast to Patrick Cohrs’s recent work[6], Kagan devotes comparatively few pages to the Paris peace conference, but these include another dissent from a commonly-expressed view; rather than being a confrontation between American “idealism” and European “realism,” he writes, the arguments between Wilson and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau arose from a “clash of national interests, perspectives, and preferences” (237). This clash, as Kagan explains, made it almost impossible to define the obligations of members of the League of Nations in a way that satisfied both the French need for a security guarantee and the American desire to avoid a binding commitment (236-38).
This problem is the central theme of the latter part of this book, which is focussed on America’s failure to join the League of Nations, the limitations of its subsequent policy, and the effect of this on the evolution of international affairs generally.[7] It has a somewhat different character than both the earlier part of this book and the previous volume. Although these are infused with Kagan’s comments on the events described, their basic form is that of an interpretative narrative. The chapters on the 1920s and most of the 1930s, however, would be better described as a sustained critique of US policy, in which Kagan develops his argument “that the United States had it within its power to preserve the peace in Europe after 1919, and at a manageable cost. But for reasons having little to do with capacity, Washington policymakers would not take the steps necessary” (220).
Crucial, in Kagan’s view, was the failure to join the League of Nations. On this issue, he departs from his tendency to attribute the actions of the United States to “Americans” generally, observing that “the most remarkable thing about the League fight was that…Americans and their representatives in Congress had initially been prepared…to join a league in some form” (259). The outcome was due to “politics,” and particularly to the actions of Senate Republicans under the leadership of Lodge. Kagan points out that Lodge, like Theodore Roosevelt and other Republican leaders, had advocated an international league “long before Wilson came to embrace the idea,” and he quotes tellingly from the letters of the veteran diplomat Henry White, who desperately pleaded with his fellow Republicans in the Senate to vote for this “eminently practical scheme (229-30, 235, 534).” He also stresses the extent to which “the strident anti-European invective” deployed by Lodge and other League opponents contrasted with their accusations a few months earlier that Wilson was “abandoning the Allies (246).” But while condemning these Republicans’ “dramatic” shift of position “for partisan purposes,” Kagan recognizes that during the course of the Senate debate, public support for the treaty declined so much as to raise “doubts about whether the United States would in fact have…played any role in the League even if Wilson had swallowed Lodge’s objections (253).”
In emphasizing the significance of this, Kagan explicitly takes issue with the positive appraisals of US policy in the 1920s that, as he notes, have become standard in the historiography since William Appleman Williams described the League fight as “a conflict over tactics” in which both sides agreed that “the strategic program” of the United States should be “the Open Door Policy.” Williams’s own account of the 1920s was devoted to analysis of the views and objectives of Republican policymakers, notably Herbert Hoover, but “revisionist” historians following his lead have since specified their program as the reduction of armaments, establishing mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of disputes and removing the “economic barriers” that prevented “the free entry of our commerce over the world. (265)”[8] The chief accomplishments of this approach are seen as being the Washington treaties of 1921-22, the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, and above all the 1924 Dawes Plan which solved an impasse over German reparations through linking them to a loan provided by private American banks, and which paved the way for the Locarno treaty of 1925 in which Germany and its former enemies mutually guaranteed the country’s western borders.
Kagan reverses the positive appraisal of this diplomacy mainly by shifting the focus from the aims of US policymakers to the perceptions of people in other countries and the effect of these on their attitudes and their countries’ policies. This leads him to emphasize the rejection of any sort of involvement with the League of Nations or the Treaty of Versailles following Wilson’s defeat, manifested in the withdrawal of US troops from the Rhineland, the refusal to accept chairmanship of the Reparations Commission, and the blocking of a proposed Geneva Protocol that would have authorised sanctions against an aggressor nation (267-8, 275, 278-80). Above all, Kagan highlights the American insistence on repayment (with interest) of the debts the allied governments had run up during the joint war effort, and the rejection of any suggestion that these should be linked to the level of German reparations. He points out that “American diplomats in Europe believed that the mere hint of U.S. flexibility on the question of war debts” would have averted the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, and thus the disastrous economic and political consequences that this had in Germany (274-83, 301-2). When two years later the Dawes Plan and Locarno forced the French to abandon the attempted coercion of Germany, the construction of the Maginot Line was the response (288-90). The departure of the French and British from the Rhineland five years earlier than stipulated in the Versailles treaty, Kagan argues, was an indirect consequence of the Hoover administration’s insistence in August 1929 on a substantial war debt repayment. Altogether, he concludes, “both by the actions the United States took, and by the actions it did not take, American policy decisively influenced decisions made in France, Britain, and Germany at critical moments that together shaped…the disorder of the 1930s (303-04).”
It was a similar story, Kagan suggests, in the Pacific, to which he devotes more attention than do many accounts of US policy in the 1920s. In this case, it is the influence of the United States on the course followed by Japan that he emphasizes. Following Akira Iriye’s authoritative account, he argues that Japanese policymakers, conscious of their nation’s strengthened position following the war, initially hoped that the Washington treaties would provide a framework for cooperation with the United States in managing the issues arising from Chinese demands for the repeal of the “unequal treaties” that granted foreign powers extra-territorial rights. But any such cooperation was ruled out by the pro-Chinese sentiments of the US public and Congress as well as by the firm determination to avoid any form of involvement. This discredited Japanese advocates of peaceful cooperation and strengthened the hand of conservatives who sought to protect Japan’s very substantial interests in China through the unilateral use of force, leading to the invasion of Manchuria and attack on Shanghai in 1931-1932 (312-29).[9] “The combination of a lack of cooperation, accommodation, and adroit diplomacy on the one hand, and inadequate military deterrence on the other,” Kagan concludes, “was almost a perfect formula for producing the Japanese decisions and actions of 1931” (335).
In the course of his narrative, Kagan links events to central themes of his history as a whole. One of these is the inseparability of geopolitics and ideology, and the variety of connections between them. Thus, he sees the passivity of US policy in the 1920s as reflective of an optimism engendered by deeply-embedded progressive assumptions that there was “a gradual, steady movement toward ever greater peace, freedom, and prosperity, driven by expanding global commerce and advances in communications and transportation as well as by the growing power of international public opinion.” In reality, Kagan argues, insofar as liberal principles had become more widely accepted, it was because in these years “the three powerful democracies—the United States, Britain, and France—were in substantial control of world affairs, economically, politically, and militarily.” Drawing an implicit comparison with the situation following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-1891, Kagan points to the great increase in the number of elected governments in Europe in 1920, and argues that this “was in large part because the dominant powers of the postwar world were democracies” (337-38). While recognising that the rise of authoritarian governments in Europe from the later 1920s on “had many internal and external causes, including the global depression that began after 1930,” he also sees it as evidence of “the declining influence and appeal of the great-power democracies and their order” (340-41). The most potent challenge to this liberal order came not, as had initially been expected, from Bolshevism but from the appeal of fascism in countries that had been defeated or had other grievances against the postwar settlement. Italy, Germany, and Japan had several clashing interests, Kagan points out, but “their shared hostility to democratic liberal capitalism and Anglo-American hegemony drew them together in a common worldview (337-45). And the failure to meet this challenge, as US isolationism only deepened in the early and mid-1930s, is seen by Kagan as partly the product of a loss of confidence in democratic capitalism resulting from the depression: American intellectuals fell into “a profoundly anti-liberal mood,” with some moving to the right and many others to the left (350-53).
Kagan again stresses that it was the scale of America’s potential power that made this failure so consequential. Pointing out that the US economy was three times the size of that of Britain or Germany and that it produced one-fifth of the world’s output, he observes that both Henry Stimson in 1932 and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 “hoped that the vague and uncertain prospect of bringing America’s vast potential power to bear might be enough both to deter the aggressor states and to put some backbone into the other democracies to stand up to them” (362, 371). In practice, what might be called the shadow of American power was insufficient to achieve either of these objectives and, Kagan argues, the repeated rebuff of any suggestion of joint action or pleas for American support “left [British Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain with few options other than appeasement.” “Whether their weaknesses were psychological or material, or both,” Kagan concludes:
the Europeans had proven that they could not preserve the peace without the added weight of the United States.…The peace settlement established after the war had depended on American power to provide reassurance to victors and victims alike, and when the United States withdrew, the settlement had collapsed, gradually and then suddenly (374-83, 385-86).
A third theme is one that runs through both volumes of Kagan’s history—that US policy is ultimately shaped by American public opinion, and that this in turn is moved by moral and ideological considerations. Accordingly, in recounting the shift in attitudes and policy toward a more involved and less studiedly neutral response to the evolving European situation, Kagan attaches great weight to “the widespread outrage” provoked by “the events surrounding Kristallnacht” in November 1938, observing that “this shift in public opinion came well before most Americans regarded Germany as a direct threat to American security” (388-91). But it seems that in fact the really significant change in US policy occurred slightly earlier as a result of Roosevelt’s conclusion after the Munich conference in September that Adolf Hitler was untrustworthy and had insatiable ambitions.[10] This was a personal judgement and, as Kagan notes, there was a discrepancy between Roosevelt’s private reaction to Munich and his public welcome for the agreement (383). To be sure, the President’s thinking and public sentiment to some extent moved in tandem, but Roosevelt’s caution about openly challenging isolationist dispositions was shown by the fact that he sought to keep secret the nature and purpose of some of his post-Munich actions – particularly giving the French the opportunity to purchase the latest types of American aircraft, and that the massive increase in aircraft production he called for far exceeded the anticipated needs of the US Army Air Corps itself.[11] In contrast to Wilson’s responsiveness in 1915–1917 to Americans’ desire to avoid involvement in the European conflict (and also to his own earlier acceptance of neutrality legislation), from this point on Roosevelt’s actions were directed by his own independent convictions as he sought to arouse and foster public support for somehow or other bringing US power to bear to encourage and assist British and French resistance to the Nazi challenge.
This effort shaped the agenda for US policymaking until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States into World War II as a full-scale belligerent, and it gave rise to the ‘great debate’ between supporters of the President’s initiatives and anti-interventionists. Kagan observes that the Democrats’ control of Congress gave Roosevelt an “enormous advantage” compared to Wilson in 1919-20, enabling his allies to bring measures to the floor only when they were sure of victory and to “bottle up” anti-interventionist resolutions in committee (414-15). He follows the historian Wayne S. Cole in claiming, somewhat excessively, that a coalition of northeastern urban liberals, Wall Street bankers and conservative Southern Democrats created a “rockbed political base for the president’s increasingly internationalist foreign policies” (395-96).[12] Nevertheless, most Republicans remained staunchly anti-interventionist, as did many German-, Irish- and Italian Americans and some peace progressives. But Kagan also points out that the America First Committee, which was formed in September 1940 to stimulate public opposition to Roosevelt’s policy, was “founded and led by members of the American elite” (395-96, 409, 412-15).
With an eye to later debates, Kagan sees “self-described ‘realists’” as among “those who opposed intervention in Europe in these years”. The people he places in this category are heterogeneous, representing a variety of perspectives. The State Department official Hugh Wilson, like the young George Kennan, deplored Americans’ tendency to assess foreign events “by a moral evaluation based on our own standards” (409-10). Peace progressives opposed rearmament and warned against the danger of America itself becoming imperialistic. Many, including former president Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert A. Taft, cited the World War I experience as showing that the United States lacked the capacity to solve Europe’s problems. And then, Kagan writes, there was the
new breed of professional foreign policy and military experts, priding themselves on “the banishment of altruism and sentiment” from their analysis and “single-minded attention to the national interests,” who took issue with Roosevelt’s portrayal of the threat posed by Nazi Germany, and stressed the safety from the danger of foreign attack provided by the oceans and America’s intrinsic strength (409-12).
In discussing this last group, Kagan disregards both differences of opinion and changes over time. For example, while Hanson Baldwin, the military editor of the New York Times, was an anti-interventionist, Edward M. Earle, of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, was not. Although Roosevelt and other administration spokesman emphasized the danger of a German attack on the Western Hemisphere if Britain was defeated (particularly in arguing for Lend-Lease), many analysts had a broader conception of the requirements of US security. Kagan quotes Nicholas J. Spykman’s emphasis on the continuing protection provided by the oceans and implies that he therefore opposed intervention, but in fact Spykman’s magnum opus was a sustained argument that the United States had a vital interest in the maintenance of a balance of power in Europe (or Eurasia)—a proposition that became the premise of the nation’s strategic planning after Admiral Harold Stark’s famous “Plan Dog Memorandum” of December 1940.[13] Nor does Kagan’s narrative really bring out the transformative effect of the fall of France in June 1940 upon American opinion and policy, which was much greater than that of Kristallnacht.[14] For many people at all levels it raised for the first time the prospect of British defeat and a Hitler-dominated continent. It rapidly led to a massive increase in defense spending and the adoption of the first peacetime draft in the nation’s history, and then gradually to the emergence of a substantial majority in both public and congressional opinion who supported actions to assist Britain and its allies even at the risk of war.[15]
Kagan is right that this movement of opinion was not simply driven by fear of a direct attack upon the American homeland, which remained a remote and unlikely possibility. (458-59) As Roosevelt had reminded his countrymen in April 1939, Americans had “a stake in world affairs,” and interests “wider than that of the defense of our sea-ringed continent.” (397). Some of these interests were indeed moral and ideological, and these, unlike strategic or economic ones, were not seen as being geographically specific. As Kagan emphasizes, this global perspective ultimately shaped policy with regard to Japan, whose aggression “came to be viewed as part of the overall assault on the democracies” (430-31)—in a way that disregarded the independence of German and Japanese policymaking and the lack of coordination between them.[16] The internal differences over the right approach to Japan and the hesitancy over how tough a line should be taken were resolved by Roosevelt’s unwillingness to make concessions at China’s expense, which doomed efforts to achieve a limited modus vivendi that would facilitate concentration on the agreed “Hitler First” strategy. But Kagan does not mention that the ideological portrayal of the war as one between democracies and authoritarian regimes had been complicated when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. The President’s extension of Lend-Lease to Russia, in the face of domestic political difficulties, can be read as the prioritizing of geopolitical considerations over ideological ones—or alternatively as showing the difficulty of encompassing the complexity and contingency of history within such abstract categories.
So, Kagan concludes:
if World War II was a “war of necessity” for the United States, it was in this broader sense…not to protect the American homeland but to defend and restore the kind of liberal order in which Americans preferred to live and which provided the greatest degree of protection against possible future threats (462).
Somewhat paradoxically, the persuasiveness of the argument that it was this general goal rather than a direct threat that motivated US policy is only enhanced by the fact that, as Kagan notes, “formal and informal soundings of public opinion before 7 December showed little evidence that the American people were ready to send troops to Europe,” and that “Roosevelt later admitted to Stalin and Churchill that he would have had a difficult time making the case for war if the Japanese had limited their attack to British or Dutch possessions” rather than Hawaii (453, 452). Given the scale of World War II, reluctance to become a belligerent at this time was natural and rational, but in his conclusion Kagan reverts to his argument that, if it had joined the League of Nations in 1919, the United States could have maintained a liberal international order at far less cost:
this was the American role that almost every major power in Europe hoped for throughout the 1920s, Germany no less than France and Britain, if only as the best means of accessing the American financing they all desperately needed (466-67).
Yet, in a welcome exercise of the historical insight that makes this book so much more than a tract for the times, Kagan recognizes that there were deeper reasons than Henry Cabot Lodge’s political opportunism why this course was not followed. “Perhaps above all,” he writes, “Americans brought to these issues the confusion and dissonance that came from being a hegemonic world power with a small, isolated nation’s worldview and sensibility.” Kagan goes on to suggest that “Americans’ difficulty in squaring their traditional sensibilities with the new realities of their power…would continue to roil the world in the decades that followed (468).” Historical lag, however, seems an inadequate explanation for a disjunction between popular attitudes and the exercise of hegemony that, as Kagan observes, has continued to some degree to the present. Ordinary Americans’ tendency to assume that the world has needed the United States more than the United States has needed the world may have been reinforced by the extent to which that has indeed been the case for a country that has not been directly dependent on any others for its security, or even its prosperity.
Building on his argument that the United States fought World War II for the sake of a liberal world order, Kagan again makes it clear in the conclusion that his commitment to liberal values goes along with a thoroughly Realist view of international politics. He reconciles these aspects of his worldview by evoking an external perspective on US actions that takes no account of support for liberalism and national self-determination in other countries. While Americans saw their war “in purely defensive terms,” he writes, “it was also an exercise in global political, ideological, and military hegemony” that involved “the imposition of American preferences on a resistant world.” Just as
in 1919, Germany and the Central Powers had succumbed to power, not to superior claims of justice,” so after World War II, “they, along with Japan and Italy, would succumb to power again.…Americans naturally believed they were in the right, but viewed from a more neutral perspective, Americans were only in the right if one believed liberalism itself was right.…Absent that moral judgment, the world order the Americans wanted to uphold, as well as the means they used to uphold it, was no more just than any other world order established and upheld by force (463-64).
The “self-regulating” liberal order US policymakers sought was an illusion, and “they would discover that, in the new geopolitics, there could be no liberal peace without the consistent exercise of American power (463-66).”
In the end, though, this book is less a piece of advocacy than a work of history and, as such, it amply deserves the chorus of praise it has received from reviewers. Kagan’s research has been prodigious, and it gives depth to a narrative that is written in a lucid and engaging style with a wealth of relevant details. Several of the interpretative judgments are nuanced and complex, a product not only of Kagan’s learning but also of the engagement of his lively intelligence with the subject matter. Although I agree with him about the ultimately decisive role of public opinion in determining foreign policy actions that involve significant costs, to my mind he over-estimates the extent to which that opinion is the product of moral and ideological concerns, and under-estimates the extent to which it may be influenced by presidential leadership (as in the run-up to World War II). But few readers will not gain from this book a greater knowledge and understanding of a period of history much referred to in contemporary policy debates, whether or not they all derive from the story the same lessons as Kagan does. Altogether, a most impressive performance and a rewarding read.
John A. Thompson is an Emeritus Reader in American History and an Emeritus Fellow of St Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge. His principal research interests have been American liberalism and US foreign policy. His publications include Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Woodrow Wilson (London: Longman, 2002), A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Cornell University Press, 2015) and numerous articles and book chapters.
[1] Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600–1898 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006),
[2] Kagan, Dangerous Nation, 5, 29.
[3] Dangerous Nation, 125, 179, 162-3, 214, 255-7, 450.
[4] Dangerous Nation, 349, 409-10, 391.
[5] See, for example, David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (London: Simon and Schuster, 2013), xxiii, 406-7.
[6] Patrick O. Cohrs, The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics 1860–1933. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
[7] This theme is reflected in the title of Kagan’s book, which comes from the account of the peace conference by the British diplomat and author, Harold Nicolson.
[8] William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York: Dell, 1962), chapter 4, especially 106; Joan Hoff Wilson, American Business and Foreign Policy: 1920–1933 (University of Kentucky Press, 1971), 24, 28.
[9] Akira Iriye, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1965); Iriye, “The Failure of Economic Expansionism, 1918–1931” in Bernard S. Silberman and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
[10] On this, see the detailed analysis in Barbara Rearden Farnham, Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of Political Decision-Making (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), especially 135-37.
[11] John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 158-59.
[12] Wayne S.Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists (Lincoln, NE., University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 294-95.
[13] Nicholas John Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1942), especially 89-90, 123, 194-7, 296-317, 453-66; Mark A. Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 24-40.
[14] “In the months following the fall of France, the American public mood, which had already begun to shift in response to Munich and Kristallnacht, shifted further (406).”
[15] There are of course innumerable accounts of this process, but one of them is in my own, Thompson, A Sense of Power, 166-76,
[16] For this, see the brief analysis in David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s America and the Origins of the Second World War (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 62, 90-1, 139-40.