Neglect of Responsibility

Eliot and Eric host Robert W. Kagan, the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Of Paradise and Power, The Return of History, The World America Made, and The Jungle Grows Back to discuss his new book The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941. They discuss the irresponsibility of American policy making after World War I, whether or not a more robust U.S. commitment to European security could have produced the kind of security order that the U.S. helped create after 1945, the ambivalence of American thinking about the necessity of global order and a reluctance to play a leading role in securing it, and the role of moral and ideological impulses in U.S. policy making. They also assess Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt as statesmen and the state of the study of diplomatic history in the academy today.

Dangerous Nation by Robert Kagan (https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Nation-Americas-Earliest-Twentieth/dp/0375724915)

Ghost at the Feast by Robert Kagan (https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Feast-Collapse-1900-1941-Dangerous/dp/0307262944/)

“The America trap: Why our enemies often underestimate us,” by Robert Kagan (Excerpt from Ghost at the Feast) in Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/19/robert-kagan-america-trap-world-war-hitler-japan/)

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010)

“The End of History?” by Francis Fukuyama (https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184)

The Change in the European Balance of Power by Williamson Murray (https://www.amazon.com/Change-European-Balance-Power-1938-1939/dp/0691101612)

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