Charles Krauthammer: life, ideas and books

Life

Charles Krauthammer was born in New York City in 1950 and raised in Montreal. He studied at McGill University and Balliol College, Oxford, and earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School in 1975. He became a psychiatrist, directed psychiatric research in the Carter administration and helped develop the third edition of the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

He turned to political writing in the late 1970s, was a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale in 1980, and later wrote for The New Republic, The Washington Post and Time. His Post column was syndicated to more than 400 publications, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1987. He served on President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics from 2002, appeared on the PBS programme Inside Washington and on Fox News, and died in 2018 of cancer.

Ideas

In a 1985 column Krauthammer coined the term Reagan Doctrine for American support to anticommunist insurgencies, and in his 1990 essay "The Unipolar Moment" he argued that the end of the Cold War had left the United States the only superpower. His view, set out in the 2004 book Democratic Realism, was that American policy should be universal in aspiration but prudent in application, defending freedom where it counts and avoiding purely humanitarian adventures. He supported the Gulf War and, at first, the Iraq War.

On domestic and ethical questions he took less predictable positions. He supported legal abortion while calling Roe v. Wade wrongly decided, opposed euthanasia and human cloning, favoured restricted embryonic stem-cell research and supported higher energy taxes to promote conservation.

Major works

• "The Poverty of Realism" (1986 essay).
• "The Unipolar Moment" (1990).
• Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World (2004).
• Things That Matter (2013).
• The Point of It All (2018, published after his death).

Why conservatives read him

Krauthammer was among the most widely read conservative columnists in the country, admired for the clarity of his argument and for a trained physician's habit of weighing evidence. Things That Matter, a collection of his essays, spent 38 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His writing on foreign policy offers an organised answer to the question of what role the United States should play after the Cold War, in the line of Jeane Kirkpatrick's realism and of Irving Kristol's neoconservatism.

His positions on bioethics and on the Iraq War attracted criticism from other conservatives and from the left, and his stress on American primacy was contested by those who favour restraint. Even critics acknowledge that he set the terms for the debates he joined, and his phrases, the Reagan Doctrine above all, remain common currency.