The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941 (Dangerous Nation Trilogy)

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Kagan has a point of view, and spells it out clearly. Agree or not the book will stimulate thought and discussion, and hopefully move that discussion to a higher plane. The United States of the early 20th century was indeed developing into an economic colossus but without the desire to play a large role in international affairs. The country, and its leaders, expressed a high level of disdain and distrust for such affairs, and were very reluctant to get intertwined in the rivalries and great power maneuvering of Europe. Kagan takes us through this period, leading up to the U.S. entry into World War I, with great detail. We get a real view of public opinion, and the political currents running through this question in the U.S. That opinion, right up until the U.S. entry into the War, always had a sizable segment favoring no involvement. The book is worth reading just for the detailed description of the tortured road Woodrow Wilson took from neutrality to American entry into WW I, and how some key public opinion changed over the course of the first three years of the war. Was there something more at stake than anger over German actions? Next, enter the party via the side entrance and take out Aleksis by dropping him in the meat grinder for the Alpha Burger achievement. Aleksis will be the one doing most of the talking on the floor of the party with an auto-pistol icon and an uncommon/cool gun. After the woman tells a story about her mother, he will take the stage, and you can press the button on the left balcony to drop him. 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." Now drop down one level, entering the single door that leads to Aleksis and the Meat Grinder. You can either hang around until Aleksis makes his speech, dropping him in the Meat Grinder. Or simply one shot him again with Aether on like we did with Egor and Wenjie. Stay out of line of slight with the Ethernalists and you'll remain undetected.

As Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. As Woodrow Wilson fought for American participation in the League of Nations he was bitterly opposed by the national Republican Party. There is some irony in Kagan’s account of how America reluctantly embraced the role as global superpower, but was unwilling to recognize the fact that it created the very conditions through its absence, that necessitated its emergence. The moral exceptionalism with which the United States held (and continued to hold) itself, and its skepticism at the time about European intentions and imperial politics, saw the country keen to remain safe behind two oceans. Had, as Kagan argues, Washington engaged slightly more, provided some indication of its interests in European disputes, or exercised a fraction of its latent power, history could well have been dramatically different. Yet Americans did not actually rush to war, and in the end it was not mass “hysteria” but a shift among conservative and moderate opinion that tilted the United States toward intervention. The turning point for many conservatives was not the sinking of the Maine but a speech on the Senate floor by the Vermont Republican Redfield Proctor. A successful businessman and former governor known for moderate views and for his close relationship with the president, Proctor traveled to Cuba in early March 1898 to see things for himself. He went “with a strong conviction that the picture had been overdrawn” by the yellow press, but what he saw changed his mind: thousands living in huts unfit for human habitation, “little children . . . walking about with arms and chest terribly emaciated, eyes swollen, and abdomen bloated to three times the normal size,” hundreds of women and children in a Havana hospital “lying on the floors in an indescribable state of emaciation and disease.” What moved him to support intervention, he said, was “the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.” After Proctor’s speech, even the nation’s more conservative newspapers came around to the view that the situation in Cuba was “intolerable,” and that it was America’s “plain duty” to intervene.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.”

Reared on a Christian hope of redemption (he was, after all, the son of a Lutheran minister), Nietzsche was unable, finally, to accept a tragic sense of life of the kind he tried to retrieve in his early work. Yet his critique of liberal rationalism remains as forceful as ever. As he argued with masterful irony, the belief that the world can be made fully intelligible is an article of faith: a metaphysical wager, rather than a premise of rational inquiry. It is a thought our pious unbelievers are unwilling to allow. The pivotal modern critic of religion, Friedrich Nietzsche will continue to be the ghost at the atheist feast. Brilliant and insightful, The Ghost at the Feast shows both the perils of American withdrawal from the world and the price of international responsibility. As Eagleton puts it, “The autonomous, self-determining Superman is yet another piece of counterfeit theology.” Aiming to save the sense of tragedy, Nietzsche ended up producing another anti-tragic faith: a hyperbolic version of humanism. Kagan lays out the thesis and then supports it with pretty difficult to argue with facts. With Europe in shambles from the war new diplomatic dynamics were being established, but as mentioned Washington was absent.

The U.S. minister to China, Paul Reinsch, warned that if Japan were not contained, it would become ‘the greatest engine of military oppression and dominance’ that the world had ever seen and that a ‘huge armed conflict’ would be ‘absolutely inevitable.’” Critics have suggested that Kagan’s view is far narrower than it perhaps should be, and that it should have included more of the parochial European and imperial interests than it does. This is an unfair criticism as Kagan’s latest is, of course, a history of American foreign relations and, more importantly, how America viewed its power and purpose at the beginning of the 20th century. Here, Kagan masterfully captures not just the high politics of Washington, but also the political machines around successive presidents, the press eco-system, and the public sentiment. This holistic view is vital to understanding America at this time, and what shaped and constrained the actions of successive presidencies. This is a particularly interesting point as the presidency at the turn of the 20th century was far more constrained by activist Congresses in exercising power than today’s contemporaries would recognize (or indeed welcome). Now, we have fought a righteous war . . . and that is rare in history . . . but by the grace of that war we set Cuba free, and we joined her to those three or four free nations that exist on this earth; and we started out to set those poor Filipinos free too, and why, why, why that most righteous purpose of ours has apparently miscarried I suppose I never shall know. A deeply researched and exceptionally readable book about a period with which many Americans are, in practice, only cursorily familiar.Kagan offers a wealth of detail, nuance, and complexity, bringing this critical period in America’s rise to global leadership vividly to life.”