The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941

By Robert Kagan

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: Apr 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805463061

Robert Kagan

ROBERT KAGAN is a senior fellow of foreign policy at the Brooking Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Foreign Policy and Prospect listed him as one of the world’s “Top 100 Intellectuals.” Kagan served in the U.S State Department as a deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, and was a principal speechwriter to the U.S. secretary of state. He is also the author of several bestselling books on foreign policy, including Dangerous Nation, which won the Lepgold Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize.