Charles Krauthammer was a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, political commentator, and one of the most influential conservative voices in American media. A former psychiatrist who became a leading neoconservative thinker, he contributed essays and columns to The Weekly Standard from its founding in 1995 through 2009, covering foreign policy, the war on terror, Middle East affairs, and domestic politics. He passed away in 2018.
The weathervanes of conventional wisdom are engaged in another round of angst about America in decline. New theories, old slogans: Imperial overstretch. The Asian awakening. The post-American world. Inexorable forces beyond our control bringing the inevitable humbling of the world hegemon.
Americans have a deep and understandable aversion to gasoline taxes. In a culture more single-mindedly devoted to individual freedom than any other, tampering with access to the open road is met with visceral opposition. That's why earnest efforts to alter American driving habits take the form of…
IN 1983, REPRESENTATIVE GERRY Studds, Democrat of Massachusetts, admitted to having sex with a 17-year-old male page. He was censured by the House of Representatives. During the vote, which he was compelled by House rules to be present for, Studds turned his back on the House to show his contempt…
During the last few weeks in Washington the pieties about torture have lain so thick in the air that it has been impossible to have a reasoned discussion. The McCain amendment that would ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any prisoner by any agent of the United States sailed through…
The remembrances of the Columbia astronauts were deeply moving, dignified in their restraint. The president's eulogy at the Johnson Space Center recalled each of them individually, gave the simple reassurance that "America's space program will go on," and modestly offered the "respect and gratitude…
Beware what you wish for. Conservatives have long hoped for the abolition of affirmative action on the grounds that racial preferences of any kind are not only destructive of the American ideal of equality but devalue minority achievement and poison ethnic relations. And the day now seems at hand,…
When President Bush enunciated his radical new doctrine of preemption, the forcible disarmament of rogue possessors of weapons of mass destruction, it was met with a mixture of disdain and consternation by a foreign policy establishment instinctively allergic to new doctrines. Most objected that…
They cannot fathom why voters might keep choosing Republicans, but they have some crazy theories.
What changed, and what didn't.
To find them, start at the old Iron Curtain and go east.
The U.N. secretary general gets entangled in l'Affaire Sommaruga.
The American empire and the Islamic challenge.
Why everything is at stake.
I. PEACEKEEPING?
Sanity and prudence combined to produce a great victory on July 31 when the House of Representatives overwhelmingly defeated—the margin was over 100 votes—the legalization of early human embryonic cloning. But the fight is not over. The Senate needs to act as well.
ABM, Kyoto, and the new American unilateralism
Murder by stoning, death by shrapnel: The fallacy of moral equivalence.
The return of Ariel Sharon.
The Cuban missile crisis is the closest the human race has come to Armageddon. Oddly though, like the moon landing -- another 1960s event of millennial importance -- it has faded from our historical imagination. For a new generation, its gravity is unappreciated. Thirteen Days, the new Kevin…
ALL THAT WAS MISSING FROM the scene were the helicopters lifting people off the embassy roof. Otherwise, Israel's panicked evacuation from Lebanon last week looked eerily like America's last hours in Vietnam.
The most improbable story of the twentieth century is the return of the Jews to sovereignty in their original homeland. The establishment of a Jewish state after two thousand years of dispersion and powerlessness is an idea that just a hundred years ago, at the founding of the Zionist movement,…
If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later . . . bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; . . . that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; . . . that humankind would…
Early this century, on New York's Lower East Side, where the Yiddish theater thrived and Shakespeare was an audience favorite, the playbill for a famous Second Avenue production read: "Hamlet, bei William Shakespeare, fartaytch un farbessert" -- Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, translated and…
Zbigniew Brzezinski is not alone in his judgment that the Cold War was won in 1986 at Reykjavik, though the fact that Brzezinski was President Carter's national security adviser shows that this is no partisan judgment. At Reykjavik, Ronald Reagan was offered the most sweeping arms control proposal…
CULTURE WARS, CHAPTER 36.
Ehud Barak did not win last week's Israeli election so much as Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu lost it. He lost it badly, 56 percent to 44 percent. In Israeli terms, that is a landslide.
Like the careless Buchanans of The Great Gatsby, Bill Clinton is known as the man who leaves friends wounded and bleeding in his wake. But of all the casualties littering his trail -- the jailed business partners, the disgraced aides, the character-assassinated former lovers -- the most serious by…
In light of the conclusion of the Senate trial of the president, the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked 22 writers, thinkers, and political actors the following questions: "President William Jefferson Clinton has been impeached and acquitted. What have we learned? What should we do now?"
One day the fate of Jerusalem, of Palestine, of Israel itself will be decided. Soon.
"When faced with a scandal, one's objective should be to deal with the president in office without damaging the office itself."
It was a remark of dazzling, if unintended, self-revelation. But its perversity being subtle, it went entirely unnoticed. It does not deserve such obscurity.
The nuclear genie is out of the bottle.
I. OPENING GAMBIT
I. A SMALL NATION
Tom Boswell, sportswriter and baseball fan extraordinaire, once wrote a book called Why Time Begins on Opening Day. And so it does. Life begins anew not with the first robin or the vernal equinox, but with the first pitch -- this year thrown out charmingly at Camden Yards by a former pigtail league…
God, I hope he's lying. In the Lewinsky affair, the mantra of President Clinton's defenders is, "I hope he's telling the truth." Regarding Iraq, however, the only hope for the country is that the president is not telling the truth about his avowed goals.
Meet the students who want to avoid the mixed-sex, free-for-all, condoms-on-demand atmosphere of college dorms.
"What we have is the world's best chess player vs. Garry Kasparov."
Oslo is beyond saving, but peace still has a chance.
Benjamin Netanyahu's subtle, tenuous achievement.
The search is on among those who would learn nothing from history for the large, irresistible forces that made this an unwinnable election for the Republicans. There are none. The reason for the Republican defeat is to be found not in the economy, not in the opponent, not in the stars, but in the…
Netanyahu opened a tunnel. Arafat started a war. It is hard to find a publication or a government on the planet that has not denounced the opening of the tunnel. About the starting of the war, silence.
THE KLEIN AFFAIR -- the savaging of Joe Klein for having lied about his authorship of Primary Colors and the charge that he thus betrayed the standards of his journalistic profession -- is indeed kleine nachtmusik. But when the self-importance meets the self-righteousness of the American press,…
The revisionists cannot understand why Netanyahu won because they simply refuse to see Israel as it is.
The Clinton administration hopes against all evidence that treating Assad with honor will induce him to moderation.
"If there is peace, peacekeepers are unnecessary. And if there is war, peacekeepers are unavailing."
"In the United States at this time," wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. . . . " Times change. Forty-five years…