World War II analogies are back in fashion. Russia sympathizers accuse NATO of warmongering, comparing tank donations to Ukraine with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and military planners warn about Pearl Harbor-style surprise attacks in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the other side characterizes those charges in terms of the appeasement policies that allowed the Nazis to spread halfway across Europe before war broke out in earnest.
Therefore, Robert Kagan’s The Ghost at the Feast could not hit the bookshelves at a better time. The second part of a trilogy about American foreign policy, the book covers 1900-1941, the period when the United States became the strongest of the great powers and missed its opportunity to create a durable peace. It was a period when other great powers, in Europe and elsewhere, expected the U.S. to step into a leadership role that it declined. American “policies exacerbated existing problems in Europe and created new ones,” and the human cost of that failure was immense.
