Mark Mazower in The Guardian:
In the late 19th century, the world was dominated by imperial European great powers, happily carving up between them any available territories in Africa and Asia. The United States watched from the sidelines, a bit-player in international affairs, the energies of its politicians dedicated to overcoming the bitter internal legacy of the civil war. With a negligible navy and a tiny diplomatic service, it was scarcely a power of even the second rank, and, apart from the unfortunate inhabitants of Cuba and the Philippines, people around the world could live their entire lives in ignorance of the Stars and Stripes. Tooze shows, more emphatically than any other scholar I have read, how decisively and how sweepingly the first world war ended this state of affairs. In the midst of the war, financial and naval power in particular moved across the Atlantic never to return. In this situation, Woodrow Wilson did not seek merely to replace the British as the hegemon of a liberal trading order, as historians used to tell us. Rather, he wanted to move the international system as a whole beyond the practices of imperial great-power rivalry that he blamed for the war itself.
More here.