By Jonathan Power

The greatest American foreign affairs columnist since Walter Lippmann was William Pfaff of The International Herald Tribune. He wrote in his path-breaking book, “Barbarian Sentiments”, that the US political atmosphere was full of “exhausted ideas, like a dead star”. Nevertheless, “these ideas remain central to the way certain subjects are discussed and to the formulation of national policy. These are ideas that people want or need to be true”.

I was told by the editorial page editor, Serge Schmemann, that when the New York Times bought the Herald Tribune, the paper decided to cut back on printing Pfaff after 20 years of using him because he was considered anti-American—which, ironically, was one indication that he was right in his diagnosis.

Freud reminded us in his “Civilization and its Discontents”, that we should “familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization, which will not yield to any attempt at reform”.

So it is in America. As Irving Kristol has said, the task of the neo-conservative intellectuals, who have been a major influence on foreign policy over the last 50 years, is “to explain to the American people why they are right and to the intellectuals why they are wrong”. That is the easy way out of Freud’s dilemma. For those who........

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