But even the tragedy of the ‘war to end all wars’ was not addressed at Versailles in 1919. As Brands and Edel write, the leaders, Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George, looked more terrified than victorious. The white knight from the New World, US President Woodrow Wilson, sought to construct a new global architecture based upon rules, norms, free trade, and open seas. His personal legacy was the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations; of the League’s original institutions, only the International Court of Justice and the International Labour Organisation survive. But it was not the cold-eyed Europeans who killed the League; it was the US Senate’s distaste for both continental imperialism and the prospect of American subjugation to international law that spelled the death knell for Versailles.

Washington’s retreat into isolationism, throughout what historian E.H. Carr called the ‘Twenty Years’ Crisis’ (1919–39), commenced in Paris, achieved its nadir following the Wall Street crash, and was bookended by the isolationist ‘America First’ Committee, whose members included aviator Charles Lindbergh and future president Gerald Ford. Pearl Harbor rudely interrupted the dalliances of the non-interventionists. By 1945, both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had resolved that Wilson’s grand vision would be resurrected, this time under the aegis of Washington’s unrivalled military and financial power. Their instruments were the San Francisco system, a ‘hub-and-spokes’ network of alliances, and the Bretton Woods regime, comprising the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the GATT (now the World Trade Organisation). The Holocaust had been replaced by hope.

Portrait of Woodrow Wilson, 1912 (photograph via the Library of Congress)

In ‘The Great Escape’, the chapter on the Cold War, Brands and Edel do rather gloss over the ‘Forty Years’ War’, writing that ‘only a single country – South Vietnam – disappeared from the map due to conquest’. Of course, the nuclear age not only inaugurated a balance of terror, but also bore witness to a new barbarism. Indeed, some historians view the second half of the twentieth century as worse than the first, with the brutality of Vietnam (more ordnance was dropped on that country than during World War II in its entirety), the killing fields of Cambodia, the insanity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the genocide in Bangladesh, and the chemical warfare of the Iran–Iraq War. Irrespective of whether Washington intervened (Vietnam) or not (Bangladesh), a bloodbath took place. But following a four-decade arms race against Moscow, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed meekly. The Cold War system disappeared in 1991, leading President Bush Sr to declare, ‘If we retreat from our obligations to the world into indifference, we will, one day, pay the highest price once again.’

As Brands and Edel note, we have seen this play before. Bush’s rhetoric may have envisaged a ‘New World Order’, but as ethnic cleansing raged in Yugoslavia, his secretary of state, James Baker, declared, ‘We don’t have a dog in this fight.’ Bill Clinton preached ‘democratic enlargement’, but, in reality, he beat a strategic retreat to the comfortable confines of domestic politics. Weeks before Clinton took office in January 1993, Bush Sr deployed a US-led humanitarian mission in Somalia. In October 1993, in an assault chronicled in Ridley Scott’s film Black Hawk Down, dead US marines were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, broadcast endlessly on US news channels. Eighteen casualties were enough for Clinton; he withdrew all US forces within months. In 1994, confronted by the million victims of the Rwandan génocidaires, Clinton chose to do precisely nothing. He found support from unlikely sources, including the conservative Samuel Huntington, who argued that it was morally reprehensible that American soldiers died to stop Somalis from killing one another.

Fear of intervention re-emerged in the wake of the post-9/11, US-led invasion of Iraq. Unwinnable wars in the Middle East led Barack Obama – too recently burnt by the chaos created by the 2011 Libyan intervention – to baulk at acting militarily against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the wake of the Ghouta chemical attacks. Obama’s reticence only encouraged Assad, his allies, and Vladimir Putin, who freely conducted Russian military operations to destroy Assad’s enemies. Unsurprisingly, Obama rejected the label of appeaser. ‘Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other … Al-Qaeda leaders … whether I engage in appeasement,’ he retorted. Nevertheless, despite his administration’s maintenance of the US-led global order, Washington began to retrench in Iraq and Afghanistan, as Obama sought to address pressing domestic financial problems. He reluctantly participated in the Libyan intervention, but Syria proved to be the red line he refused to cross.

Military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan paved the way for the neo-isolationist resurgence led by Donald Trump. Whereas Obama understood the centrality of the Bretton Woods and San Francisco systems to international order, the Trump administration questioned the core logic of US global engagement. Trump has either withdrawn, or threatened to withdraw, variously, from NATO, the World Trade Organisation, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Arms Trade Treaty, and, ominously, the INF Treaty, dealing with nuclear weapons in Europe.

Ultimately, the question is whether the United States is still prepared to pay any price and shoulder any burden to maintain the liberal international economic order. The Lessons of Tragedy counsels the virtues of order, prudence, and patience. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is probably the least likely government to accept such wise advice.