William Pfaff
William Pfaff is a globally respected political commentator and author on international relations, contemporary history and U.S. policy. He is published in five countries and his column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services.
The American Academy of Diplomacy in 2006 awarded him its annual prize for distinguished commentary, saying that "for more than a generation, William Pfaff has been called the 'dean' of American columnists and commentators. Few can rival his impact on thinking about the deepest dilemmas of foreign policy and the prime movers in human society, inspired by his moral vision of the proper use of power and limits on its abuse." The late American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., called him "Walter Lippmann's authentic heir."
Pfaff is the author of eight books on American foreign relations and contemporary history, including analyses of nationalism and political utopianism. His "Barbarian Sentiments," was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the city of Geneva's Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A recent compendium of his columns on the early years of the war on terror, "Fear, Anger and Failure,'' was described by Russell Baker of The New York Times as "page after page, article after article what should have been said week after week [in Washington] as Bush's cheery civilian warriors marched us into the Middle East. Really splendid work." Peter Preston, former editor of London's The Guardian, reviewed the book under the title, "the man who was right."
Pfaff also writes for The New York Review of Books, and has contributed to Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal, The National Interest, and to leading European political journals. For twenty years he was political essayist for The New Yorker magazine. He is the former deputy director of Hudson Research Europe in Paris, European affiliate of the well-known American policy research institute of the 1960s and 1970s. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a veteran of infantry and Special Forces service in the U.S. Army.
William Pfaff Samples
Can the EU be saved?
PARIS -- It is not simply the euro zone that is threatened by the dramatic economic discrepancies that now exist among its members, as well as the large indebtedness gap that exists between the southern members of the zone and the German-led bloc ...
US weighs Syrian intervention, despite the consequences
PARIS -- The present debate in the United States over making policy for a Middle East that has been profoundly changed by the events of the past three years unhappily echoes past policies that failed.
More union in the EU doubtful
PARIS -- Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has consistently said that the answer to Europe's problems is more political integration, and this is a view held elsewhere among those trying to find a way out of the conundrum that the economic crisis ...
Half-baked theories continue to direct global history
PARIS -- The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable official policymakers and the Western policy community is to slogans and to magical thinking.
A right and proper death of the euro
PARIS -- When the proposal was initially made for a common European currency, it seemed to this writer to be a good idea, with the flaw that it wouldn't work.
Anonymous murder from a safe distance
PARIS -- War is war and murder is murder. Nor is the United States constitutionally at war.
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