Renewable Revolution

William Pfaff, Critic of American Foreign Policy, Dies at 86

By MARLISE SIMONS MAY 1, 2015

PARIS — William Pfaff, an international affairs columnist and author who was a prominent critic of American foreign policy, finding Washington’s intervention in world affairs often misguided, died on Thursday in a hospital here. He was 86.

His wife, Carolyn Pfaff, said the cause was a heart attack after a fall.

Mr. Pfaff, who moved to Paris in 1971, wrote a syndicated column that appeared for more than 25 years in The International Herald Tribune, now The International New York Times. He was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and other publications, the articles informed by his deep knowledge of history and philosophy.

Mr. Pfaff (pronounced FAFF) also wrote eight books, which further examined American statecraft as well as 20th-century Europe’s penchant for authoritarian utopianism. In “The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia,” published in 2004, he examined what drove European intellectuals to embrace communism, fascism and Nazism.

In “Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century” (1989), he argued that the United States had historically harbored unrealistic assumptions about its benevolence in its foreign policy, often with disastrous results. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award. “In fresh, lucid and arresting prose,” the citation said, Mr. Pfaff “articulates America’s geopolitical illusions.”

He revisited the theme in his most recent book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (2010).

“What has occurred since 1945,” he wrote in its introduction, “has amounted to an American effort to control the consequences of the 20th-century crisis in Europe and the breakdown of imperial order in Asia, the Near and Middle East, and latterly in Africa while maintaining that supervisory role over the Americas first claimed by the United States in 1823” with the Monroe Doctrine.

   

The latest American miscalculation, he wrote, was in the Middle East, where the United States was waging an “unnecessary and unwinnable” war “against radical currents in the Islamic religion.”

A soft-spoken man with the appearance of an Oxford don, Mr. Pfaff never stopped writing, even though his health had been declining well before his fall a week ago. In his last column, dated April 22, written before Britain’s parliamentary elections of May 7, he analyzed the implications for the United States and Europe if Britain withdrew from the European Union. Other recent articles dealt with Iran, Ukraine and the Islamic State.

Often taking a lonely stance and labeled an iconoclast, Mr. Pfaff was attacked at times as anti-American for his unapologetic criticism of American interventions in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“He rejected the messianic illusions of successive American administrations,” said a longtime friend, John Rielly, president emeritus of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Although many American pundits consider him a liberal, he was in many respects a classic Christian conservative — one who was skeptical about liberal notions of inevitable progress and always aware of the limitations of human activity.”

In response to critics, Mr. Pfaff would say that he regarded himself as an American patriot    concerned above all with safeguarding long-term American interests and values.

His insights into European and American affairs drew many admirers. One was William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, which published about 70 articles by him called Reflections. In a letter from 1987, shortly after he stepped down as editor, Mr. Shawn wrote, “I don’t think any other writer has ever done anything quite like your elegant and brief political essays,” which, he added, were “written in a literary form of your own invention.”

“I admired those essays extravagantly,” Mr. Shawn wrote. The letter, framed, was on display in Mr. Pfaff’s book-lined office at his home in Paris.

The American Academy of Diplomacy, in presenting him with an award in 2006, called Mr. Pfaff “the ‘dean’ of American columnists and commentators, not through seniority but through substance,” noting “his moral vision of the proper uses of power and limits on its abuse.”

Mr. Pfaff’s columns were syndicated in Japan, South Korea, Australia, India and the Arab press of the Persian Gulf, among others.

“But ironically his columns appeared less and less frequently in major newspapers in the United States    , the superpower whose policies he analyzed in tart, limpid and critical commentary,” said Jonathan Randal, an American author and correspondent.

Mr. Pfaff was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in December 1928, a descendant of English, Irish and German immigrants. He grew up in Columbus, Ga., where his father and uncle ran military supplies stores. He studied literature and political science at the University of Notre Dame, from which he graduated.

Enlisting in the Army, he served in the infantry and a Special Forces Unit during the Korean War and afterward. He later worked at the lay Catholic magazine Commonweal until 1955, when he left to travel to Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He also helped open the European office of the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based conservative research firm.

Over time he became more pessimistic, his wife, the former Carolyn Cleary, said. “He lashed out at America because he loved it, but he became sadder and sadder about the nation that was so great, yet was belittling itself. He wanted America to stay home and fix its own country.”

Besides his wife, Mr. Pfaff is survived by their son, Nicholas; their daughter, Alexandra Pfaff-Drouard; and five grandchildren.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/business/media/william-pfaff-critic-of-american-foreign-policy-dies-at-86.html