Everything about Charles Krauthammer totally explained
Charles Krauthammer (born
March 13,
1950 in
New York City), is a
Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated
columnist and
commentator. Krauthammer appears regularly as a commentator on
Fox News and as a weekly panelist on
Inside Washington. His weekly column appears in the
The Washington Post and is syndicated in more than 190 newspapers and media outlets. He is a contributing editor to the
Weekly Standard and
The New Republic.
Career
Krauthammer was born in
New York City to
Jewish parents of
French citizenship. 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, where he attended
Harvard Medical School. In his first year there in 1972, Krauthammer was
paralyzed in a serious diving accident. Continuing medical studies during his year-long hospitalization, he graduated with his class, earning a M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975, and then began working as a
psychiatrist at
Massachusetts General Hospital. In October 1984, he became board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
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" and published a second important paper. 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 New Republic magazine. During the presidential campaign of 1980, Krauthammer served as a speech writer to
Vice President Walter Mondale.
In 1981, following the defeat of the Carter/Mondale ticket, Krauthammer began his journalistic career, 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, 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. In a 2006 column in The American Prospect criticizing The New Republic and other proponents of the war in Iraq, liberal blogger
Matthew Yglesias wrote that Mr. Krauthammer is "very possibly the worst journalist working in America today, a relentlessly pernicious force, never right about anything, who feels his commentary shouldn't be shackled by the small-minded bonds of accuracy or logic."
Opinions
Ideology
Krauthammer is generally considered a
conservative or
neoconservative. However, he's a
supporter of
legalized abortion, an opponent of the
death penalty, an
intelligent design critic and an advocate for the
scientific consensus on
evolution, calling the religion-science controversy a "false conflict", a supporter of
embryonic stem cell research (involving embryos discarded by fertility clinics), and a longtime advocate of radically higher energy
taxes to induce
conservation.
Meg Greenfield,
editorial page editor for
The Washington Post who edited Krauthammer's columns for 15 years, called his weekly 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."
Foreign Policy and Interventionism
Cold War:
Krauthammer first gained attention in the mid-1980s when he first used the phrase
Reagan Doctrine in his
Time magazine column. The phrase was a reference to the 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 reflected a new U.S. foreign policy that went beyond
containment of the
Soviet Union to
rollback of these recent Soviet acquisitions in the
Third World. The policy, which was strongly supported by
Heritage Foundation foreign policy analysts and other conservatives, was ultimately embraced by Reagan's senior national security and foreign policy officials. Krauthammer's description of it as the "Reagan Doctrine" has since endured.
In “The Poverty of Realism” (
New Republic, February 17, 1986), he developed the underlying theory “that the end of American foreign policy isn't 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, titled “The Unipolar Moment” 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 U.S. 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.
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 shouldn't be committing the lives of its soldiers to purely humanitarian missions in which there's no American national interest at stake.
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'll commit blood and treasure only in places where there's a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.”
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 in to war in Afghanistan. He supported the Iraq war on the “realist" grounds of the strategic threat the 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 what he believed were the primary arguments for and against the war, writing, “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's 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."
On the eve of the invasion, Krauthammer wrote that “reformation and reconstruction of an alien culture are a daunting task. Risky and, yes, arrogant.” In February 2004, Krauthammer cautioned that "it may yet fail. But we can't afford not to try. There isn't a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it's 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.” Krauthammer in
2003 noted that the
reconstruction of Iraq would provide many benefits for the Iraqi people, once the political and economic infrastructure destroyed by Saddam was restored: "With its oil, its urbanized middle class, its educated population, its essential modernity, Iraq has a future. In two decades Saddam Hussein reduced its GDP by 75 percent. Once its political and industrial infrastructures are reestablished, Iraq's potential for rebound, indeed for explosive growth, is unlimited."
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. 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
Krauthammer was appointed to President
George W. Bush's
President's Council on Bioethics in 2002. He supports relaxing the Bush administration's limits on federal funding of human embryonic
stem cell research. But he's opposed
human experimentation, human
cloning and
euthanasia. He has warned that scientists were beginning to develop the power of "creating a class of superhumans." 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, 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."
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”. in
1985, and the
Guardian of Zion Award of
Bar-Ilan University in
2002.
Miers nomination
Krauthammer 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
October 21,
2005, Charles Krauthammer published "Miers: The Only Exit Strategy," in which he explained that all of Miers' relevant constitutional writings are protected by both
attorney/client privilege and
executive privilege. This presented a unique face-saving solution to the mistake: “Miers withdraws out of respect for both the Senate and the executive's prerogatives”. Six days later Miers withdrew, employing that argument. She stated her respect for the “the strength and independence of our three branches of government” and noted that the “protection of the prerogatives of the Executive Branch and continued pursuit of my confirmation are in tension.” Therefore, ”I have decided that seeking my confirmation should yield.”
The same day, NPR noted that “Krauthammer's scenario played out almost exactly as he wrote.” Columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that the White House was following Krauthammer’s strategy “almost to the letter.” And a few weeks later, the New York Times reported that Krauthammer’s “exit strategy” was “exactly what happened” and that he “has subsequently gotten credit for giving [theBush administration] a plan.”
Israel
Krauthammer strongly opposed the
Oslo accords, predicting that
Palestinian Liberation Organization leader
Yasir Arafat would use the foothold it gave him in the
West Bank and
Gaza to continue the war against
Israel that he'd ostensibly renounced in the
Israel-PLO Letters of Recognition. In a
July 2006 essay in
Time, Krauthammer asserted that the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict was fundamentally defined by the Palestinians' unwillingness to accept compromise.
During the
Israel-Lebanon war in 2006, Krauthammer wrote a column, "Let Israel Win the War," saying: "What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?" He later criticised Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert's conduct, arguing that he "has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later."
Krauthammer supports a
two-state solution to the 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 the importance of a security barrier between the two states' final borders will be an important element of any lasting peace.
Torture
In a
December 5,
2005 in
the Weekly Standard, 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's 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. Other responses include
Michael Kinsley in
Slate Magazine and the
Wall Street Journal editorial.)
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've 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."
Francis Fukuyama's 2006 book
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy criticizes Krauthammer, mentioning a February 2004 speech about the Iraq war which led Fukuyama to "resign from the neoconservative movement." 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'."
Further Information
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