Robert Kagan on American Foreign Policy Between World War I and World War II—and Beyond

Conversations with Bill Kristol

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🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 81 minutes

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Summary

The period between World War I and World War II has long been a reference point in foreign policy debates, yet much about the period remains in dispute. Why did the United States turn away from internationalism after the First World War? Could the US have shaped an enduring liberal world order in the 1920s? To discuss these questions, we are joined by Robert Kagan, the historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. According to Kagan, Usually the peace is lost at a time when the threats are not obvious, and the need to do something is not obvious. Drawing on his recent book The Ghost at the Feast, Kagan highlights the centrality of American leadership to any peaceful world order, and contends it was not inevitable the US would turn away from Europe and Asia in the 1920s. He draws particular attention to the interrelation of domestic politics to foreign policy, and considers the possibility of how under different domestic circumstances Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism might have succeeded. Kagan points to an enduring paradox of American foreign policy: Americans will not tolerate a real serious assault on liberalism in the world writ large, but they are perfectly willing to ignore what’s going on until that challenge appears unmistakably—and they feel they have no choice. Yet the decisions of the 1920s and 1930s, and of the last eighty years, reveal the profound consequences of inaction as well as action.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined for the second
0:19.6	time by Bob Kagan, Robert Kagan, distinguished historian and commentator on foreign policy and
0:27.0	other matters. We did a conversation, Bob, in 2019 shortly after, will you let that book,
0:32.7	The Jungle, goes back, short book in 2018 and a long article, The Strong Man, Strikes Back,
0:38.1	Strong Man, Strike Back in 2019. And I've got to say I look back at both the conversation
0:42.4	of those short book and the article, and they stand up very well, unfortunately, in 2023,
0:48.8	the jungle continues to try to grow back. I guess we're pushing back a little bit against the
0:54.5	jungle in the former Putin, but anyway, we're here to discuss that a little bit more importantly,
1:01.1	Bob's new book, The Ghost at the Feast America and the Collapse of World Order in 1900s and 1941,
1:07.3	a magisterial history of those 40 years. It's the second volume of Bob's history of American
1:13.1	foreign policy, the first dangerous nation from the beginning to 1900. And Bob Kagan is also
1:18.6	a senior fellow, and that also is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. So, Bob,
1:23.6	thanks for joining me again. Great to hear, Bill. Thank you. So I want you to read the book,
1:28.4	and we won't go through it on, you couldn't go through it in all the detail and so many interesting
1:33.1	stories and perspectives in it. I thought maybe I'd just begin by asking about the title,
1:37.0	which they can get us into an interesting discussion of World War One and post-World War One
1:41.6	and domestic politics and foreign policy, but The Ghost at the Feast, that's an elegant,
1:46.4	elegant title for foreign policy history. Well, I got it from the great British diplomat Harold
1:54.3	Nicholson, who was present at Versailles in 1919 and helped negotiate the ultimate, you know,
2:04.0	peace treaty. But what he records in his memoirs is that, you know, for everybody who was
2:11.2	participating in those talks, there was one great fear, which he referred to, he basically said,
2:17.2	the notion that the American people might not abide, but whatever commitments Wilson made,
	...

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