William Pfaff, a longtime commentator on American foreign policy, died this weekend. Pfaff's heyday was the 1970s when he wrote a regular column for William Shawn's New Yorker. After that, he went into a sort of exile, writing opinion pieces for the International Herald Tribune and based in Paris. American publications mostly lost interest in him, which was tragic because he was from the start opposed to the Iraq War.
He would have been a welcome antidote to the self-righteous moral crusading of Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman's Panglossian jingoism.
It would be easy to label Pfaff a liberal. He opposed Vietnam, the invasion of Iraq, and many of American's other exploits abroad. He issued frequent reproofs of America for its militarism. Lately, he'd been blaming the U.S. for expanding the NATO alliance eastward and making Putin feel humiliated and threatened.
But he was also deeply conservative, not in the Republican sense, but in his skepticism about the possibility of change in this world. Countries were mired in their history. Conflicts they fought centuries ago were still relevant. Progress came haltingly if at all. Wars in one form or another would be never ending.
To boil down his outlook to a few principles and put them in my own words:
--America's foreign policy would be strongest when it had its own domestic house in order. The flood of money in politics, gridlock in D.C., and neglect of the poor mattered as much if not more than our behavior on the world stage.
--America was not exceptional. Pfaff loved this country and thought there were many unique things about it to admire, but never did he think there were no historical precedents for American hegemony. We weren't chosen to be a beacon of light to the rest of the world.
--Wilsonian Internationalism was disastrous for America. The idea of America as this moral crusader making the world a better place--all it did, according to Pfaff, was give rise to foreign police debacles.
--America should rarely intervene abroad. He wasn't an isolationist, but he thought most of the world's conflicts and problems were too complex for America to resolve. He even was hesitant about intervening to stop genocide. The risk was too great that we would make the situation even worse.
Appreciations of Pfaff can be found here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/...
http://www.chicagoreader.com/...
Many of his columns and writings are collected here:
http://www.williampfaff.com/