THE GHOST AT THE FEAST

A broad-ranging history of America’s early evolution as a world power, a more deliberate process than is often supposed.

In this second volume of the Dangerous Nation trilogy, Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes that late-19th-century America was a kind of conservative paradise. With a tiny military to support, taxes were low, and isolation “meant less need for strong central government, less military bureaucracy, and less need for speedy and efficient decision-making.” In this regime, foreign policy was an afterthought. That began to change with the war with Spain in 1898, which in some ways was a foregone conclusion, for even if Americans were not broadly interested in the outside world, they didn’t mind going to war—and Cuba, at least in the eyes of the Founding Fathers, was “a natural appendage of the growing country.” Seizing former Spanish possessions also helped curb other nations’ designs. Germany, for instance, clearly wanted the Philippines after occupying Chinese territory in 1898 and touching off a colonial land grab throughout East Asia. The U.S. clung to the Philippines not just to deny the archipelago to other powers, but also to civilize—in Protestant terms, of course—what William Howard Taft called “our little brown brothers.” Germany faded from the scene in Asia, but it soon turned to the project of a comprehensive “domination of Europe.” Again, Americans didn’t much care, and after World War I, the nation fell into “a profoundly anti-liberal mood” that supposed that democracy was doomed, a mood that Axis powers used to their advantage. Kagan cogently examines what he considers certain inevitabilities (e.g., the attack on Pearl Harbor) while delivering novel interpretations of events. For example, he suggests that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union earlier than intended in order to inspire the Japanese attack, which he supposed, incorrectly, would tie up the American military in the Pacific and keep it out of Europe.

An insightful study of the birth of the American empire and the resulting “American century.”