William Pfaff

PARIS -- There is no reverse gear on the machine of governmental power. If power exists, it will be seized and exploited. To do what? That will be revealed in the course of this power's employment. Its potential uses will automatically be discovered by...

PARIS -- The remarkable May 23 address by President Barack Obama was primarily an effort to establish the legality of actions taken by himself and his administration, notably the targeted drone killings, to settle his conscience in his continuing...

PARIS -- When the Barack Obama administration announced that American foreign policy would "pivot" from Europe and the Middle East to Asia, some European commentators interpreted the announcement as a return to that isolationism which characterized the...

PARIS -- Great power rivalries created the conditions in which the First World War became possible, but the war itself was set off by an isolated and intrinsically unimportant act of terrorism by a Serbian nationalist. All that followed was driven by...

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 of...

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. They were intended to promote democracy and usually...

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 has...

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. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in which the...

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. Although inexpert in economics (being a product of the age of arithmetic), it struck me as an...

PARIS -- War is war and murder is murder. The law draws the distinction. The American armed drone is a weapons system of war, not of policemen. And even if it were a police weapon (as it may, one fears, become in the future), the United States...

PARIS -- It is, I suppose, too discouraging to face the fact that in international affairs (and indeed in national affairs; but that is another subject) paradox and contradiction rule the world. Policymakers and politicians consistently get what they don'...

PARIS -- Ten years ago, invading American troops were moving through stifling dust storms towards Baghdad from Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, which British forces were fighting to secure. Baghdad's outskirts were reached on April 3, and the Baghdad...