Political columnist and stern critic of US’s imperial ways

William Pfaff, who has died in France aged 86, was an international affairs columnist and author who was a prominent critic of US foreign policy, finding Washington's intervention in world affairs often misguided.

Pfaff, who moved to Paris in 1971, wrote a syndicated column that appeared for more than 25 years in the International Herald Tribune, now the International New York Times. He was a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and other publications.

Pfaff (pronounced Faff) also wrote eight books, which further examined US statecraft as well as 20th-century Europe’s penchant for authoritarian utopianism.

In The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia, published in 2004, he examined what drove European intellectuals to embrace communism, fascism and Nazism. In Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century (1989), he argued that the United States had harboured unrealistic assumptions about its benevolence in its foreign policy, often with disastrous results.

A soft-spoken man with the appearance of an Oxford don, Pfaff never stopped writing, even though his health had been declining for a long time. In his last column, dated April 22nd, he analysed the implications for the United States and Europe if Britain withdrew from the European Union. Other recent articles dealt with Iran, Ukraine and the Islamic State.

Iconoclast

Often taking a lonely stance and labeled an iconoclast, Pfaff was attacked at times as anti-American for his unapologetic criticism of US interventions in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. “He rejected the messianic illusions of successive American administrations,” said a longtime friend, John Rielly, president emeritus of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Although many American pundits consider him a liberal, he was in many respects a classic Christian conservative - one who was skeptical about liberal notions of inevitable progress and always aware of the limitations of human activity.”

Pfaff’s columns were syndicated in Japan, South Korea, Australia, India and the Arab press of the Persian Gulf, among others. “But ironically his columns appeared less and less frequently in major newspapers in the United States, the superpower whose policies he analysed in tart, limpid and critical commentary,” said Jonathan Randal, a US author and correspondent.

Pfaff was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in December 1928, a descendant of English, Irish and German immigrants. He grew up in Columbus, Georgia, where his father ran a military supplies stores.

He studied literature and political science at the University of Notre Dame. Enlisting in the army, he served in the infantry and in a special forces unit during the Korean War and afterward. He later worked at the lay Catholic magazine Commonweal.

Over time he became more pessimistic, his wife, the former Carolyn Cleary, said. "He lashed out at America because he loved it, but he became sadder and sadder about the nation that was so great, yet was belittling itself. He wanted America to stay home and fix its own country."

He is survived by their son, Nicholas, their daughter, Alexandra Pfaff-Drouard, and five grandchildren.