Stories by Charles Krauthammer
Decline Is a Choice
The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.
Oct 19, 2009
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. On the other side of this debate are a few--notably Josef Joffe in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs --who resist the current fashion and insist that America remains the indispensable power. They note that Read more
The Net-Zero Gas Tax
A once-in-a-generation chance.
Jan 05, 2009
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 regulation of the auto companies --the better to hide the hand of government and protect politicians from the inevitable popular backlash. But it's not just love of the car. America is a nation of c Read more
Sex Scandals and Double Standards
Two parties, two pages, two different outcomes.
Oct 16, 2006
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 for his colleagues' reprimand. He was not expelled from the Democratic Caucus. In fact, he was his party's nominee in the next election in his district--and the next five after that--winning reelection Read more
The Truth about Torture
It's time to be honest about doing terrible things.
Dec 05, 2005
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 Senate by a vote of 90-9. The Washington establishment remains stunned that nine such retrograde, morally inert persons--let alone senators--could be found in this noble capital. Now, John McCain Read more
Redeeming Columbia
It's time for a mission commensurate with the risks.
Feb 17, 2003
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 of the people of the United States." The mood of grief felt so keenly upon hearing the news passed far more quickly than one would have expected--and far more quickly than it did after the Challen Read more
How Not to Abolish Affirmative Action
The dangers of a victory delivered by the Supreme Court.
Feb 10, 2003
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, the issue having once again reached the Supreme Court. The University of Michigan cases now before the Court grant explicit racial preferences to black, Hispanic, and Native American students. The prac Read more
The Obsolescence of Deterrence
Cold War nostalgia grips the antiwar movement. Apparently they've forgotten about the balance of terror.
Dec 09, 2002
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 this policy, aimed today at Iraq, was simply too reckless and costly, risking disastrous outcomes--from "Black Hawk Down" urban fighting in Baghdad to chemical and bioweapon attacks on American troops or Read more
The Fantasy Life of American Liberals
From the November 25, 2002 issue: Three generations of left-wing idiocy are enough.
Nov 25, 2002
THE ELECTION RETURNS are in, and the high priest of American liberalism has spoken. "If you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture," warned Bill Moyers in his post-election PBS commentary. And not only will George Bush, right-wing radical, now attempt to impose a theocracy, he is preparing, among other depredations, "to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives . . . to transfer wealth from working people to the rich . . . [and] to eviscerate the environment." Odd. Read more
Year One
We didn't change, after all.
Sep 09, 2002
WE DIDN'T CHANGE after all. Things changed, yes. Flags waved. A president emerged. The economy slid. The enemy scattered. Politics cooled. The allies rallied. The allies chafed. Politics returned. But we didn't change. We thought we would. After the shock of the bolt from the blue, it was said that we would never be the same. That it was the end of irony. That the pose of knowing detachment with which we went to bed September 10 was gone for good. Not so. Before the first year was out, it was ba Read more
Our Real Friends in Europe
From the August 26, 2002 issue: To find them, start at the old Iron Curtain and go east.
Aug 26, 2002
THE EUROPEAN UNION has just warned any country hoping to join the E.U. that it had better not make any arrangements with the United States promising not to extradite Americans for trial at the new International Criminal Court in The Hague. The ICC is Europe's pet project for bringing justice and truth to the world. Its origin is the experiment in war crimes trials for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, two places where the Europeans stood firmly in repose while the massacres raged. (They raised n Read more
Kofi's Choice
The U.N. secretary general gets entangled in l'Affaire Sommaruga.
May 13, 2002
KOFI ANNAN has a problem. In his eagerness to nail Israel for the "Jenin massacre," the U.N. secretary general named an investigating committee of three, including one Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). This was unfortunate for Annan, despite the fact that the committee was disbanded within days (a combination of Israel's insistence on conditions of fairness and emerging evidence that the entire massacre story was a fiction). In choosing Somma Read more
The Real New World Order
The American and the Islamic challenge
Nov 12, 2001
I. THE ANTI-HEGEMONIC ALLIANCE On September 11, our holiday from history came to an abrupt end. Not just in the trivial sense that the United States finally learned the meaning of physical vulnerability. And not just in the sense that our illusions about the permanence of the post-Cold War peace were shattered. We were living an even greater anomaly. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the emergence of the United States as the undisputed world hegemon, the inevitable di Read more
The Enemy Is Not Islam. It Is Nihilism
Why everything is at stake.
Oct 22, 2001
EUROPE'S GREAT RELIGIOUS WARS ended in 1648. Three and a half centuries is a long time, too long for us in the West to truly believe that people still slaughter others to vindicate the faith. Thus in the face of radical Islamic terrorism that murders 6,000 innocents in a day, we find it almost impossible to accept at face value the reason offered by the murderers. Yet Osama bin Laden could not be clearer. Jihad has been declared against the infidel, whose power and influence thwart the triumph o Read more
Disgrace in Durban
The U.N. conference on racism was worse than just hot air.
Sep 17, 2001
THERE ARE FEW MUSEUMS as powerful as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but it contains what appears to be a structural oddity. The exhibit fills three floors. The middle floor covers the Holocaust itself; the last, the rescue and aftermath. But the entire first floor, which can take hours to go through, consists of the prelude, the 1930s and the relentless Nazi campaign to delegitimize the very existence of Jews. Why is the prelude given as much space as the Holocaust itself? Because the prelu Read more
Arafat's War
How to end it.
Sep 03, 2001
I. PEACEKEEPING? WHAT PASSES FOR THE GREAT MIDDLE EAST debate in Washington centers upon whether the Bush administration is "doing enough." The president is criticized for not "engaging" in Middle East diplomacy. The fact that the last such presidential engagement—the Camp David debacle of July 2000—led directly to the worst fighting and the worst Arab-Israeli crisis in 20 years seems not to deter the critics. Mindlessly, the call to "do more" grows. What does "doing" mean? If anything, it means Read more
The Great Stem Cell Hoax
The research promises results about a half century from now.
Aug 20, 2001
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. Before it does, however, it is worth preparing oneself for the gale-force hype that Senate advocates will unleash in defense of the indefensible. One has only to look at the debate on the floor of the House to see the extraordinary le Read more
The Bush Doctrine
ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism
Jun 04, 2001
I. THE WORLD AS IT IS Between 1989 and 1991 the world changed so radically so suddenly that even today the implications have not adequately been grasped. The great ideological wars of the twentieth century, which began in the '30s and lasted six decades, came to an end overnight. And the Soviet Union died in its sleep, and with it the last great existential threat to America, the West, and the liberal idea. So fantastic was the change that, at first, most analysts and political thinkers refused Read more
The Boys in the Cave
Murder by stoning and the fallacy of moral equivalence
May 28, 2001
ON MAY 9, two 14-year-old Israeli boys who had been playing hooky from school and hiking on the West Bank were found in a cave battered to death and mutilated. In Western news reports, this horror was not permitted to stand alone. It was routinely coupled with a recent Palestinian death. "The deaths came two days after a 4-month-old Palestinian baby girl was killed by Israeli tank fire and further roiled emotions in a week of spiraling violence that neither side seems able to control," reported Read more
The New Middle East
The return of Ariel Sharon
Feb 19, 2001
Imagine General Douglas MacArthur, come back to life in, say, 1980, defeating Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination and going on to become president, crushing President Jimmy Carter more resoundingly than either George McGovern or Barry Goldwater had been beaten. Well, the equally improbable has just happened in Israel, minus the resurrection. To be sure, Ariel Sharon, who won the prime ministership in a landslide, did not quite rise from the dead. After his disgrace in the Lebanon war Read more
Costner, Cuba, and the Kennedys
Hollywood takes a stab at the Cuban missile crisis -- and almost gets it right
Jan 01, 2001
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 Costner docudrama about to open in theaters, tries to remedy that deficit. It does it so well in so many ways that one can only regret that in the end it fails. It fails because it tells a lie. Ironicall Read more
Costner, Cuba, and the Kennedys
Hollywood takes a stab at the Cuban missile crisis -- and almost gets it right
Jan 01, 2001
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 Costner docudrama about to open in theaters, tries to remedy that deficit. It does it so well in so many ways that one can only regret that in the end it fails. It fails because it tells a lie. Ironicall Read more
Costner, Cuba, and the Kennedys
Hollywood takes a stab at the Cuban missile crisis -- and almost gets it right
Jan 01, 2001
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 Costner docudrama about to open in theaters, tries to remedy that deficit. It does it so well in so many ways that one can only regret that in the end it fails. It fails because it tells a lie. Ironicall Read more
The Lebanon Debacle
Does Israel's retreat mark the beginning or the end of its demoralization?
Jun 05, 2000
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. Lebanon was, in fact, Israel's Vietnam. The analogy is almost perfect: a guerrilla war that the conventional army was winning in military terms, but whose losses the home front could not sustain. The difference, of course, is that having withdrawn from Vietnam, the United States still ha Read more
The Collapse of Zionism
May 29, 2000
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, seemed delusional. The only thing more improbable is this: That after merely fifty years of independence, the Jews of Israel would tire of it, lose faith in the enterprise, and forfeit their redemption. A Read more
On to Mars
From the January 31, 2000 issue: America has been lost in space. It's time to find our nerve again.
Jan 31, 2000
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 travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad. --Michael Crichton I WHAT MANNER OF CREATURE ARE WE? It took 100,000 years for human Read more
ON TO MARS
America has been lost in space;
11:00 PM, Jan 30, 2000
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 travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad. Michael Crichton What manner of creature are we? It took 100,000 years for humans to get Read more
Shakespeare in Trouble
Mute Cordelias, cross-dressing Hamlets, and other willfulness
Dec 13, 1999
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 improved. The urge to translate and improve upon the master turns out, unfortunately, not to be the exclusive property of recent immigrants. It is by now the norm. One citadel of translation and impro Read more
Arms Control
The Cold War was won at Reykjavik. The Senate's defeat of the test ban treaty is Reykjavik II.
11:00 PM, Oct 31, 1999
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 in history. And he would have accepted it -- had Mikhail Gorbachev not insisted that the price was American surrender of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan walked out, stunning not just Gorbachev Read more
The Mayor, the Museum, and the Madonna
Pseudo-courageous blasphemous art
Oct 11, 1999
CULTURE WARS, CHAPTER 36. The Brooklyn Museum of Art readies an exhibition of high decadence called "Sensation." The mayor of New York threatens to close down the museum if the exhibit is not canceled. The mayor is pilloried by the usual suspects -- a consortium of New York museums, the ACLU, the highbrow press -- for philistinism and/or First Amendment abuse. The exhibit itself is nothing very special, just the usual fin-de-siecle celebration of the blasphemous, the criminal, and the de Read more
THE ISRAELI EARTHQUAKE
What Bibi did, what Barak will do
May 31, 1999
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. Why did the election come out the way it did? First, the timing. Bibi did not want this election. His plan was to wait until next year. Not just because his mandate ran till then, but because Israel has been in a mild recession, somewhat comparable to the recession that President Bush suffered under in the '91-'92 Read more
Thank you for signing up for the Daily Standard newsletter! You should receive your first newsletter very soon.
We're sorry, there was an error processing your newsletter signup.