Robert Kagan - The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941

She sails upon a summer seasafe from attack, safe even from menace, she hears from afar the warring cries of European races and faiths, as the gods of Epicurus listened to the murmurs of the unhappy earth spread out beneath their golden dwellings

James Bryce, 1888

Power changes everything. The United States at the end of the nineteenth century was in many respects the same country it had been a century earlier. Its system of government was shaped by the same Constitution, albeit modified by the Civil War. Its guiding principles were still based on those articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which Americans revered if not always practiced. Americas favorable geography was the same, although American dominance of the North American continent was more complete. Yet Americas power relative to that of other nations in the worldmeasured in wealth, land and resources, population, and potential military capabilityhad grown so great as to change completely the way the rest of the world viewed the United States. It also changed the way Americans viewed themselves, though less completely. William McKinley declared the era of isolation over. But most Americans were not much interested in change and, at the end of the nineteenth century, still held to old ideas about themselves. They still saw their nation standing apart from the rest of the world, different and also superior, and by and large they liked it that way.

This perception was understandable. America did stand apart, even in 1900, a virtual distant island in geopolitical terms, on a huge continent surrounded on two sides by vast oceans, thousands of miles from all the other great powers of the world. Americans physical location had long given them unique advantages and a unique perspective. First and foremost, it had given them both wealth and a remarkable degree of economic independence. The United States by 1900 had grown into the worlds largest and most dynamic economy. Some of this success was due to the particular American style of capitalism, the open and highly mobile nature of its society, compared to the more rigid and inhibiting traditions and class structures of Europe. American patent and commercial laws fostered invention, innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment, both domestic and foreign. But modern economists judge that the biggest factor behind Americas breathtaking economic growth in the last decades of the nineteenth century was simply the availability of abundant natural resources. Americans led the world in the production of copper, coal, zinc, iron ore, lead, and other valuable minerals. They produced half the worlds oil and a third of its pig iron, silver, and gold.

This relative economic self-sufficiency complemented a historically unique geopolitical independence. Of the large, industrializing nations of the worldBritain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Japanthe United States was the only one surrounded only by much smaller, weaker powers and by oceans. The European great powers all lived on top of each other and therefore in a constant state of insecurity. The Asian powers, either the formerly great, like China, or the aspiring to be great, like Japan, competed for control of land and resources with each other and also with the British, French, Russian, and, more recently, German empires. Only Americans did not live in a highly contested strategic environment. This was not due simply to fortune or to the allegedly free security afforded by Britains Royal Navy. Americans had once shared the continent with the powerful empires of Britain, France, Spain, and Russia, but over the course of a century they had driven or bought them out and compelled their acceptance of U.S. hegemony through stubbornness, belligerence, and occasional aggression. The task had been made easier by enduring geopolitical facts, however. The other great powers main concerns were generally closer to home, thousands of miles from the New World. Thus Americans at the end of the nineteenth century found themselves enjoying a level of security that others could never share, or even comprehend. On the eve of World War I the British ambassador, Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, had to explain to his puzzled colleagues that Americans lived on a continent that was remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors. They therefore enjoyed an unvexed tranquility, free from the contentions and animosities that were part of the everyday existence of Europeans.