Krauthammer: In whose national interest?

The Irish Times' new columnist is a leading neocon, a Washington insider who supports torture conditionally and thinks the invasion of Iraq was a risk worth taking. By Colin Murphy

When Mark Steyn left the pages of the Irish Times last September, the newspaper found itself with a vacancy for a Canadian, American-based, neocon-supporting, syndicated columnist.

Fortunately, that gap has been filled: Charles Krauthammer, whose column now runs weekly on a Monday in the Irish Times, ostensibly covers the same bases as Mark Steyn: right-wing, Republican, anti-liberal, pro-"war on terror", pro-Israel.

But Krauthammer is no Steyn clone. While Steyn writes his often-obnoxious, sometimes humorous columns from his rural pad in New Hampshire, Krauthammer writes from the heart of the Washington establishment and sits, literally, at the high table of neoconservatism.

For Krauthammer, "neocon" is not a simple shorthand for all that is wrong/right with US foreign policy. Rather, it is a coherent and rigorous philosophy of foreign policy that Krauthammer and his intellectual comrades believe came of age in the invasion of Iraq.

Neoconservatism states that the US can and should mould the world in its shape. Since the end of the Cold War, we have lived in a "unipolar" world (Krauthammer first called it so in 1990), where the US has both the responsibility and an opportunity to forge democracies out of recalcitrant societies.

Krauthammer has been advocating this for two decades or more, through the pages of the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard and at the journal, the National Interest, the bible of neoconservatism.

Francis Fukuyama was one of the National Interest's, and neoconservatism's, leading lights. He coined the phrase and the theory of the "end of history" in a landmark essay in the journal in 1991, and was a neocon for as long as Krauthammer, since before it became fashionable.

Yet when Krauthammer outlined a new vision of neoconservatism in a paper in February 2004, Fukuyama decided he'd had enough. He'd heard this philosophy developed through the 1990s, particularly at the National Interest's annual board dinners (both he and Krauthammer were directors, along with Paul Wolfowitz, Samuel Huntington and other neocon leading lights).

Krauthammer was calling for a new neoconservatism, to be called "democratic realism", closely based on the Bush administration's foreign policy and, ostensibly, on what had been learned from Iraq. Its principle would be this: "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 threat to freedom."

But there was a problem: Iraq. In a response to the speech in the pages of the National Interest, Fukuyama wrote that Krauthammer's speech was "strangely disconnected from reality".

"One gets the impression that the Iraq war has been an unqualified success, with all of the assumptions and expectations on which the war had been based vindicated," said Fukuyama.

Fukuyama sought to reclaim some central tenets of neoconservatism, amongst them the danger of ambitious social engineering: as Fukuyama put it, "if the United States cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in Washington DC, how does it expect to bring democracy to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot?"

Krauthammer's key fallacy, Fukuyama said, lay in overstating the threat of Islamic terrorism – Krauthammer has compared the threat posed by al-Qaida to that posed by Hitler and Soviet Russia; Fukuyama describes it more simply as a "classic counter-insurgency war", requiring "a combination of carrots and sticks".

Fukuyama's critique came too late – he's since left the National Interest to form his own, more moderate, journal (the American Interest), and the neocons will forever be defined by Iraq.

But, while the influence of the movement he championed has waned in the second Bush administration amidst the failure to establish security in Iraq, Krauthammer remains an influential public commentator.

He wrote provocatively on torture in May last year, justifying its use in exceptional circumstances by "the ticking time bomb problem". (You capture a terrorist who has knowledge of a bomb primed to go off... What do you do to get the information out of him in time? Krauthammer's answer: Anything. But you should have specialised agents to do the torturing, he says.)

His writings on torture, and on Iraq, are critically undermined by his lack of consideration of the ugly realities that the policies he advocates lead to – a characteristic which may have reached its nadir in his description of the Nicaraguan Contras as "an indigenous anti-communist rebellion that ultimately succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America".

More recently, he wrote an article in the Washington Post, just as it looked like the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court was going to prove a serious embarrassment for George Bush. Krauthammer suggested how Miers could withdraw without embarrassment. A week later, Miers withdrew, citing the justification which Krauthammer had suggested.

Born in 1950 to Jewish parents in New York, Krauthammer was raised in Montreal, Canada. He studied politics and economics at McGill university, followed this with a one-year scholarship to Oxford, and then returned to the US to study medicine at Harvard.

In his first year, he was paralysed in a serious diving accident. Against the odds, Krauthammer resolved that he would not lose out on his studies. When his dean visited him in hospital, Krauthammer told him, he wrote later, "that, to keep disaster from turning into ruin, I had decided to stay in school and with my class".

Days later, Krauthammer was lying in traction in hospital viewing haematology slides on the ceiling and being lectured by his professor. He managed to keep with his class, even doing ward rounds in a wheelchair with specially-designed medical instruments, and graduating on time in 1975.

He became a psychiatrist, and then moved into directing research for Democrat President Jimmy Carter's administration, and started contributing to the New Republic magazine. By the presidential campaign of 1980, he was a speechwriter for vice president Walter Mondale.

Krauthammer's essays in the New Republic won him the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism in 1984, and then, in 1987, the Pulitzer Prize, for "distinguished commentary".

Those awards bear witness to a key characteristic, one which has yet to shine in his Irish Times columns. He writes beautifully. His sentences are precise, elegant and erudite; his arguments are relentless, and he brings both passion and honesty to his writing.

Though the Irish Times boasted of him as "our new columnist", the reality is more banal – Krauthammer's Irish Times column is recycled from the Washington Post, where it first appears three days earlier. This ties the Times into running columns that may not be appropriate or of interest to an Irish readership – such as the 16 January column, which featured a detailed political critique of Spielberg's new film, Munich, almost two weeks before anyone in Ireland had seen it. But the main thing is, the paper still has its neocon voice.