William Pfaff
American author, op-ed columnist for the International Herald Tribune and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
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Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.
America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.
For four hundred years European civilization has dominated the world - for better or for worse. It is convenient, and flattering, for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it very rash to do so.
The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.
These choices by small countries are vital for them, but may be more momentous than commonly understood for others as well, including the major powers, who presumptuously believe they are in control of events.
It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.
But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.
A great nation's foreign policy involves power, money, trade, oil and arms, but it proeeds from ideas.
The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with.
Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans.
The frontier that remains is is the interior one, the most forbidding and mysterious frontier.
Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.
One cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen.
The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.
We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth.
The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well.
The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres.
The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.
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