The Washington Post - The America Trap

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‘The America trap: Why our enemies often underestimate us’

Editor’s note: The brief, unsettling moment in history between the end of World War I in 1918 and the United States’ entrance into World War II in late 1941 covers the same timespan as between 2000 and today: 23 years. America in that earlier interval moved from war footing to almost total isolation and then to fighting in an even more deadly conflict.

The United States’ instincts in the 1920s and 1930s, as historian and Opinions editor at large Robert Kagan reminds us, were decidedly insular. Americans saw their nation as a world power but balked at the responsibilities that came with it. That would prove hard to change.

In an exclusive adaptation from his new book, “The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941,” Kagan details the global rise of fascism beginning in 1925, tallies the miscalculations of Berlin and Tokyo as both pondered what they imagined to be a neutral United States, and reminds us that President Franklin D. Roosevelt built domestic support for intervention slowly — maybe too slowly — because he did not want to get ahead of the public.

In circumstances that may speak to the present, the combination of events created what Kagan calls “the America trap” — the tendency of our enemies and rivals to underestimate what the United States can accomplish when united.

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