• Wikimedia Commons
  • William Pfaff in 1984

I mourn the death of essayist William Pfaff at the age of 86. Pfaff seemed to me deeper and wiser than other international correspondents; he certainly wrote better. He didn’t conspicuously globe-trot—from Paris he cast his eye on America in the world, and his tone was often annoyed and rueful. We were not, in his eyes, humanity’s savior or crown jewel (for all our lovable mistakes); our silliness often marginalized us. I discovered him in the New Yorker in the late 1970s, and my admiration never wavered.

“And I was there. And after the first day or two, everyone on the European side—they were rolling their eyes. It was not a disagreement on what to do. It was that these people from the United States didn’t know what the problems were! They were living in a conceptual universe so sloganized and so remote from real possibility—you know, from the density and complexity of the real issues. I mean, they were giving people lectures about, ‘Don’t you understand? The Russians are bad!’”

Was this stupidity? we asked him. Was it intellectual immaturity?

“I don’t think it’s either. I think it is ignorance, a certain canonization of ignorance in American society. I think it’s a breakdown of schools. The people are not really seriously taught. It’s certainly a consequence of the trivialization of issues by television, and the press, which has deteriorated very seriously. But it sort of disqualifies us from grown-up discussion.”

We asked Pfaff about America’s retreat to the margins of world affairs.

“When you go into Eastern Europe they don’t ask ‘What does America think?’” he said. “They ask ‘What do the Germans think?’ The United States is now—irrelevant. The United States is big and can make a difference if it throws its weight around, so everybody is a little wary of what the United States might do. But as for solving their problems or getting on with the important things, they’ve got to humor the United States and get on with it themselves.”

“[Obama] left dealings with Europe, and with the United States’ most important and dangerous interlocutor, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, under the controlling influence of a neoconservative cabal in the State Department, committed to reckless policies of American and NATO expansion in Northern Europe.”