SPECIAL ARTICLE: “The Voice of Unconventional Wisdom” – Review by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The New York Review of Books of William Pfaff’s The Irony of Manifest Destiny.

“His knack for seeing behind received ideas, attitudes and platitudes of the age means that, over the fifty years Pfaff has been writing about international politics in innumerable columns and essays, and in a series of books that now culminates with The Irony of Manifest Destiny, he has been among the most prescient of observers. His latest book examines in historical perspective ‘the tragedy of America’s foreign policy’ that events have, in effect, obliged him to take as his last great subject….He explains how the acquisition of great power by the United States has meant ‘a subordination of ethical values to an ideology of national triumphalism,’ which he sees as part of the strange and indeed terrifying transformation of Western Enlightenment civilization into ‘our twentieth- and twenty-first century experience of extreme ideological violence.”
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<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/voice-unconventional-wisdom/>