ABSTRACT
The concept of collective security may appear to have been illusory — the desperate dream of desperate people who longed for peace and feared war. Yet, in the 1980s, deprived of that guide to relations with the outer world, Americans move like figures in a nightmare, locked in a maze with no apparent exit, trapped in a game with every possible outcome dismaying. Moving through a world without standards or laws, Americans, like others, act like figures in a nightmare. The idea took form just before global war spread to the United States in 1941, and dissolved at some point in the 1960s. United States policy had developed no further when war swept across the world in 1939. The Axis leaders had every reason to believe that the United States would remain passively neutral in the face of their aggressions.
