Mindful of the Road to Serfdom — Robert Kagan’s Book, THE GHOST AT THE FEAST.

THE GHOST AT THE FEAST :  America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900 – 1941, by Robert Kagan (2023, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 633 pages) 

This political book by Robert Kagan is parallel in importance to a similar previous text about American and world history published some time ago :  THE PERILS OF PROSPERITY, 1914 – 1932, by William E. Leuchtenburg.  The Kagan book is much more thoroughgoing in the examination of the years leading up to WWI and years after the 1929 stock market and overall economic crash in the U.S. and around the globe.  The present reading goes into the politics of the Grand Alliance (see also THE FATEFUL ALLIANCE, by George Kennan) in Europe and the entanglements of that arrangement that led to the First World War and why and how the extreme measures taken against the German military and German society by the Treaty of Versailles.  The narrative does portray, in an accurate fashion it seems, the overall attitude of Americans at the time of WWI that was to avoid war at pretty much all costs.  The conflict in Europe, whether with or between economic and political allies and friends, was seen as a European squabble at first by many Americans.  Provocations by German submarines in sinking U.S. ships and ships with Americans aboard, most prominently the Lusitania, marked by their happening the eventual entry of America into WWI in earnest during 1917.  The argument, in fact anti – American, by some continentals is that Europe was “bled white” by the time the U.S. entered the war on the side of the Allies and that America reaped a windfall of war profits from assuring an Allied victory and being on the winning side.  The book does not go into great detail in presenting this view, though above all presents the point that many U.S. politicians and citizens alike were against intervention and while not completely “isolationist” were and are labeled as such. 

The story follows with a portrayal of the interwar years and the implementation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, including public finances of Germany and the way these provoked great hyperinflation that caused further hardship on anyone in German territory or under German influence.  In retrospect, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles are evaluated from a perspective of deliberately vengeful and hateful conditions contrasted with those among the French and in U.K. who suffered under the Germans during the war.  Separately, the book allows the reader to examine the rise of communism in East Asia after 1911, up through the interwar years when the revolution gained strength slowly, and then through 1927 – the year of the Japanese attack on Nanjing; and thereafter.  Chiang Kai – shek in one way, as he battled two enemies – a communist volunteer force and the Japanese Shantung army that took Manchuria from China and planned to take more – despite his modern army, was not equipped to fight guerillas and his defenses were spread too thin throughout even just the South of the country to concentrate on his enemies and then to organize properly to decisively overwhelm Mao’s and Lin Biao’s troops.  This was just in China up until the early 1940’s. 

The importance of Japan in both world wars and in the gambling tactics of the WWII axis powers cannot be underestimated along with the ways President Roosevelt foresaw the place of Japan in the modern world.  The text could have contained more content on this, though the examination of Western European politics and the rise of the nazis – Belgium and Central Europe, the place of U.K. in WWII and its ramp up to the war, the Russian Revolution – each in and of itself, and more, subject matter for other volumes – takes up a good amount of the text, maybe ten very valuable chapters after illustrating WWI and the Wilson administration, the League of Nations and again the Treaty of Versailles,  This is a great example of what a survey history text can be and is richly annotated, as well with many, many valuable documentary sources as cited from the literature in this time 1900 – 1940.  A superlative and greatly substantive, educative read.