Thanks to the bitter partisanship of the 19 elections, American ‘foreign policy had been politicized as never before’ (p. A few months later, American voters handed control of Congress to a Republican Party still unreconciled to the re-election two years earlier of Woodrow Wilson, a Democratic president. Unwilling in 1918 to give up the resource-rich Ukraine any more than Vladimir Putin is today, Vladimir Lenin created a ‘hand-picked’ government of his own, which was soon ‘directing a ragtag army of mercenaries against Kiev’ (p. This is territory worth exploring, and the similarities between past and present are eerie whether in the struggle over Ukraine, in the halls of the US Congress, or in the failed attempts of European governments to rebound from economic crisis by resorting to what is now called ‘expansionary austerity’. ‘Given the rise of China’, Tooze points out, ‘these questions have an obvious force’ (p. Those years ‘resonate down to the present’ because they raise questions about a ‘lack of will and judgment’ on the part of a ‘rich, powerful democracies’ that remain unanswered. Indeed, the US edition of this book is subtitled The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931. His revisionist history sweeps across events in Europe and America, touches on the Middle East, India, and delves into the fractious relationship between China and Japan before ending at the abyss of 1931, when the Great Depression became a global catastrophe. But Tooze, a professor of history and international security studies at Yale University, aims for something more. To those familiar with the history of the First World War, this hardly is a revelation.

But as Adam Tooze shows in his latest work, that shift occurred a generation earlier and before American forces had even fired a shot in what was once called the Great War.

Ask Americans when their country became the world’s dominant power and chances are most will point to the hard-fought victory in the Second World War.

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