Charles Krauthammer

 

Charles Krauthammer, (born 13 March 1950 in New York City^[1][2]), is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist and commentator. Krauthammer appears regularly as a guest commentator on Fox News. His print work appears in the The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and The Weekly Standard.

Career

Krauthammer was born to Jewish parents of French citizenship.^[3]

He was raised in Montreal, Canada where he attended McGill University and obtained an honors degree in political science and economics in 1970. From 1970 to 1971, he was a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford. He later moved to the United States. In his freshman year at Harvard Medical School in 1972, Krauthammer was paralyzed in a serious diving accident.^[4]

Continuing medical training during his rehabilitation, he earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975, and then began working as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

From 1975-1978, Krauthammer was a Resident and then a Chief Resident in Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. During this time he and a colleague identified a form of mania (a part of bipolar disorder) which they named "secondary mania"^[5] and published a second important paper.^[6] The standard textbook for bipolar disease (“Manic Depressive Illness” by Goodwin and Jamison) contains nine citations of his work.

In 1978, Krauthammer quit medical practice to direct planning in psychiatric research for the Jimmy Carter administration, and began contributing to the magazine The New Republic. During the presidential campaign of 1980, Krauthammer served as a speech writer to Vice President Walter Mondale.

In 1981, Krauthammer began his journalistic career by joining The New Republic as a writer and editor. His New Republic writings won the 1984 National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism. In 1983, he began writing essays for Time magazine. In 1985, he began a weekly column for the Washington Post for which he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

In 2006, the Financial Times named Krauthammer the most influential commentator in America,^[7] saying “Krauthammer has influenced US foreign policy for more than two decades. He coined and developed `The Reagan Doctrine’ in 1985 and he defined the US role as sole superpower in his essay, `The Unipolar Moment’, published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Krauthammer’s 2004 speech `Democratic Realism’ set out a framework for tackling the post 9/11 world, focusing on the promotion of democracy in the Middle East.”

On the other hand, left-wing commentators have been quite hostile to Krauthammer. For example, in a 2006 column in The American Prospect criticizing The New Republic and other proponents of democratization in Arab countries, Matthew Yglesias wrote that "Krauthammer is very possibly the worst journalist working in America today, a relentlessly pernicious force, never right about anything, who feels his commentary should not be shackled by the small-minded bonds of accuracy or logic."^[8]

Opinions

Ideology

Krauthammer is generally considered a conservative or neoconservative. However, he is a supporter of legalized abortion^[9][10][11], an opponent of the death penalty^{[12][13][14][15]}, a debunker of Intelligent Design and defender of evolution^[16][17], a supporter of embryonic stem cell research (involving embryos discarded by fertility clinics)^[18][19][20], a longtime advocate of radically higher energy taxes to induce conservation^{[21][22][23][24]}, and, in a written work of over a million words, has never once quoted Leo Strauss. The late Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor of the Washington Post who edited Krauthammer for 15 years, called Krauthammer's column "independent and hard to peg politically. It's a very tough column. There's no 'trendy' in it. You never know what is going to happen next."^[25]

Foreign Policy and Interventionism

Cold War:

Krauthammer first gained attention in the mid-1980s with his formulation of the Reagan Doctrine in a Time magazine essay.^[26] It outlined a new American foreign policy of supporting anti-communist insurgencies around the globe (most notably Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan) as a response to the Brezhnev doctrine and as a way to go beyond containment of the Soviet Union to rollback of its recent acquisitions in the Third World.

In “The Poverty of Realism” (New Republic, February 17, 1986), he developed the underlying theory “that the end of American foreign policy is not just the security of the United States, but what John Kennedy called ‘the success of liberty.’ That means, first, defending the community of democratic nations (the repository of the liberal idea), and second, encouraging the establishment of new liberal polities at the frontier, most especially in the Third World.” The foreign policy, he argued, should be both “universal in aspiration,” and “prudent in application,” thus combining American idealism and realism. Over the next 20 years these ideas developed into what is now called "Democratic Realism.”

Post-Cold War:

In the lead article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Unipolar Moment.”^[27] Krauthammer coined the term “unipolarity” to describe the world structure that was emerging with the fall of the Soviet Union. Conventional wisdom of the late 1980s was that the bipolar world of the Cold War would give way to a multipolar world in which the US was one of many centers of power, co-equal to the European Union, Japan, China, and others. Krauthammer predicted that instead a unipolar world would emerge dominated by the United States with a power gap between the number one and number two power that would exceed any other in history. He also suggested that American hegemony would inevitably exist for only a historical "moment,” lasting at best for three or four decades.

Hegemony gave the United States the capacity and responsibility to act unilaterally if necessary, Krauthammer argued. Throughout the 90s, however, he was circumspect about how that power ought to be used. He split from his neoconservative colleagues who were arguing for an interventionist policy of “American greatness.” Krauthammer wrote that in the absence of a global existential threat the United States should stay out of "teacup wars” in failed states, and instead adopt a “dry powder” foreign policy of nonintervention and readiness.^[28]

Krauthammer opposed purely “humanitarian intervention" (with the exception of overt genocide). While he supported the 1991 Gulf War on the grounds of both humanitarianism and strategic necessity (preventing Saddam Hussein from gaining control of the Persian Gulf and its resources), he opposed American intervention in the Balkan wars on the grounds that America should not be committing the lives of its soldiers to purely humanitarian missions in which there is no American national interest at stake.^[29]

9/11, Iraq and the War on Terror:

He laid out the underlying principle of strategic necessity restraining democratic idealism in his controversial 2004 Kristol Award Lecture: “We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.”^[30]

The 9/11 attacks, Krauthammer wrote, made clear the new existential threat and the necessity for a new interventionism. On September 12, 2001 he wrote that, if the suspicion that al Qaeda was behind the attack proved correct, the United States had no choice but to go to war in Afghanistan.^[31] He supported the Iraq war on the “realist" grounds of the strategic threat to Saddam regime posed to the region as UN sanctions were eroding and of his weapons of mass destruction; and on the "idealist" grounds that a self-sustaining democracy in Iraq would be a first step towards changing the poisonous political culture of tyranny, intolerance and religious fanaticism in the Arab world that had incubated the anti-American extremism from which 9/11 emerged.

In October 2002, he presented the arguments for and against war thus: “Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists. The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable -- and must be preempted.

“Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare…. “I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time. Nonetheless, I can both understand and respect those few Democrats who make the principled argument against war with Iraq on the grounds of deterrence, believing that safety lies in reliance on a proven (if perilous) balance of terror rather than the risky innovation of forcible disarmament by preemption."^[32]

On the eve of the war, Krauthammer wrote that “reformation and reconstruction of an alien culture are a daunting task. Risky and, yes, arrogant.”^[33] In February 2004, Krauthammer cautioned that "it may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world--oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.”^[34]

In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in Philadelphia, he noted how the democratic tide in the Arab world had turned in early 2006 with a fierce counterattack by radical Islamist forces in Lebanon, Palestine and especially Iraq, where the Samarra bombing had led to a major intensification of sectarian warfare.^[35] He continues to argue that despite the unexpected initial successes in Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent deterioration on both fronts, most particularly Iraq, the entire region is now in play and the outcome will depend on America’s ability to tolerate this long war.

President's Council on Bioethics

Appointed to President George W. Bush's President's Council on Bioethics in 2002, Krauthammer has opposed human experimentation, human cloning and euthanasia^[36] but supports relaxing the Bush administration's limits on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research.^[37]

Krauthammer may have a unique perspective on stem cell research, being a paraplegic himself. A fellow member of the Council, Janet D. Rowley, insists that Krauthammer's vision is still an issue far in the future and not a topic to be discussed at the present time,^[38] yet many council members tend to agree with Krauthammer.

Religion

Krauthammer is a critic of “Intelligent Design”, and wrote several articles in 2005 likening it to “tarted-up creationism”.^[39]

He has received a number of awards for his commentary related to religion, including the People for the American Way’s First Amendment Award for his New Republic essay “America's Holy Wars”.^[40] in 1985, and the Guardian of Zion Award of Bar-Ilan University in 2002.^[41]

Miers nomination

Krauthammer was among the many conservatives who criticized President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to succeed Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He called the nomination of Miers a “mistake” on several occasions. He noted her lack of constitutional experience as the main obstacle to her nomination.

On 21 October 2005, Charles Krauthammer published “Miers: The Only Exit Strategy”,^[42] in which he explained that all of Miers' relevant constitutional writings are protected by both attorney/client privilege and executive privilege. The only face-saving solution to the “mistake” would be if “Miers withdraws out of respect for both the Senate and the executive's prerogatives”. On 27 October 2005, Miers indeed withdrew her candidacy for the Supreme Court.

Israel

Krauthammer opposed the Oslo accords, predicting that Yasir Arafat would use the foothold it gave him in the West Bank and Gaza to continue the war against Israel that he had ostensibly renounced. These predictions were vindicated by the launching of the second intifada in 2000. In a July 2006 essay in Time Magazine, Krauthammer asserted that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was fundamentally defined by the Palestinians' unwillingness to accept compromise.^[43]

Krauthammer supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Contrary to many conservatives, he supported Israel's Gaza withdrawal as a step towards rationalizing the frontiers between Israel and the future Palestinian state. He believes in the importance of a security barrier between the two states' final borders as an important element of any peace.

Torture

In an article appearing on 5 December 2005 in the Weekly Standard,^[44] Krauthammer argues that any ban of torture must entail at least two exceptions. He claims that in both the situation of imminent danger (“ticking time bomb scenario”) or if it is believed that torture can procure life-saving information in the case of a high-level terrorist deeply involved in the planning of future attacks.

This column appeared amidst the controversy surrounding Senator John McCain's proposed ban on torture in an Amendment on the U.S. Army Field Manuals and Cruel, Inhumane, Degrading Treatment. (Many pundits wrote on this issue; Andrew Sullivan's article in the New Republic was seen as a counter to Krauthammer's Weekly Standard piece.^[45] Other responses include Michael Kinsley in Slate Magazine^[46] and the Wall Street Journal editorial.^[47])

Neoconservatism

In a high profile piece in Commentary, Krauthammer wrote that “above all”, neoconservativism “is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has come”. The original “fathers of neoconservatism” were “former liberals or leftists”. More recently, they have been joined by “realists, newly mugged by reality”, such as Condoleezza Rice, Richard Cheney and George W. Bush, who “have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers’ past experience, more mature”. The “Bush Doctrine”, according to Krauthammer, is essentially “a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy”.^[48]

Francis Fukuyama's 2006 book America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (ISBN 0-300-11399-4) criticizes Krauthammer, mentioning a February 2004 speech about the Iraq war which led Fukuyama to "resign from the neoconservative movement."^[49] Krauthammer responded that "Fukuyama's claim that I attributed 'virtually unqualified success' to the war is a fabrication. [...] Far from calling it an unqualified success, virtual or otherwise, I said quite bluntly that 'it may be a bridge too far'."^[50]

See also

Bush Derangement Syndrome

References

External links

• Krauthammer's Weekly Column in The Washington Post
• Krauthammer Archives at Jewish World Review
• Krauthammer's biography at the Washington Post Writers Group website

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