Overview

"An NPR Book of the Year 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. And it was a nation unsure about the role it wanted to play in the world, if any. 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 do both - ""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. Brilliant and insightful, The Ghost at the Feast shows both the perils of American withdrawal from the world and the price of international responsibility."

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9781805463054

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Reviews

A professional historian's product through and through, sharply focused on its period and supported by amazingly detailed endnotes... Probably the most comprehensive, and most impressive, recent analysis we have of how Americans regarded the outside world and its own place in it during those four critical decades... Mr. Kagan recounts presidential decision - making and official actions in great detail, yet offers even greater analysis of the swirls of U.S. public opinion, the arguments of the press and pundits, the evidence in Gallup polls, and the ever-important actions of senators and congressmen. * Wall Street Journal * In a series of nimble polemics, and in expansive, finely wrought historical works, Kagan has spun variations on his theme: America's unfolding purpose is to be the world's organizing power, it owes this sense of mission to deeply ingrained American ideals, and the chief threat to this will-to-primacy comes not from without, but from within... Staggering... Kagan succeeds brilliantly in calling up the emotional temperature of the period. * New York Times * Sets the competing impulses in domestic politics - the instinct to stand back versus shining-city-on-the-hill internationalism - against the breakdown of the balance of power arrangements that had kept the global peace since the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15. The story is fluently told. * Financial Times * Robert Kagan's The Ghost at the Feast could not hit the bookshelves at a better time... Kagan's second installment shows how the real wonder is not that the Americans joined the fight in 1917 and 1941 but rather that they entered the Cold War without having been directly attacked. If Kagan's finale is anything like the trilogy's first two installments, it will provoke, inform, and enliven our debates for years to come. * Washington Examiner *

Author Information

Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for the Washington Post. He is also the author of The Jungle Grows Back, The World America Made, Dangerous Nation, and Of Paradise and Power. He served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He lives with his wife in Virginia.

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