Charles Krauthammer is a rapier-witted columnist who reminds me of Joseph Alsop, who skewered liberals, détentists, and anti-Vietnam War activists in Washington Post op-eds during the Cold War. Alsop used his Georgetown salon to extend his influence; Krauthammer’s salon is Fox News.

Krauthammer’s most memorable essay may have appeared in the Winter 1990/1991 issue of Foreign Affairs, in the heady period during America’s first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In “The Unipolar Moment,” Krauthammer wrote that, “Communism is indeed finished… The last of the messianic creeds that have haunted this century is quite dead. But there will constantly be new threats disturbing our peace.”

Krauthammer predicted that the demise of USSR would usher in a period of U.S. unipolarity that would last for decades – unless “America succeeds in running its economy into the ground.” To maintain Washington’s dominance and leadership, the United States needed to prevent “the rise of small aggressive states armed with weapons of mass destruction.” With a nod to Dick Cheney, Krauthammer wrote that, “It is a certainty that in the near future there will be a dramatic increase in the number of states armed with biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them anywhere on earth.”

No region mattered more in this regard than the Persian Gulf: “If the Persian Gulf is not a vital interest, then nothing is. All that is left is preventing an invasion of the Florida Keys.” The United States had the power to prevent proliferation in the Gulf: “American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself.”

The biggest challenges to reaping the benefits of the unipolar moment, in Krauthammer’s view, were the combined forces of “post-Vietnam liberal isolationism” and “a resurgence of 1930’s-style conservative isolationism.” “There is no alternative,” he wrote, “to confronting, deterring and, if necessary, disarming states that brandish and use weapons of mass destruction… The alternative to unipolarity is chaos.”

In the Winter 2002/2003 issue of The National Interest, after the rout of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Krauthammer triumphantly returned to this theme, critiquing the “declinist school” that mocked his earlier essay “as either wild optimism or simple American arrogance.” In Krauthammer’s considered judgment, the Afghan campaign amounted to “an unprecedented assertion of American freedom of action and a definitive statement of a new American unilateralism.” His concerns over the resurgence of conservative isolationism were misplaced, but the obsessions of liberals with “international legality” and multilateralism remained problematic. “A realist,” wrote Krauthammer, “would hardly forfeit the current unipolarity for the vain promise of goo-goo one-worldism… Unipolarity, managed benignly, is far more likely to keep the peace.”

Afghanistan would be a steeping stone to greater ambitions:

The new unilateralism defines American interests far beyond narrow self-defense. In particular, it identifies two other major interests, both global: extending the peace by advancing democracy and preserving the peace by acting as balancer of last resort… The promotion of democracy multiplies the number of nations likely to be friendly to the United States, and regional equilibria produce stability that benefits a commercial republic like the United States… Critics find this paradoxical: acting unilaterally for global ends. Why paradoxical? One can hardly argue that depriving Saddam (and potentially terrorists) of WMD is not a global end. Unilateralism may be required to pursue this end… What is the essence of that larger interest? Most broadly defined, it is maintaining a stable, open, and functioning unipolar system.

Francis Fukuyama offered a rejoinder in the Summer 2004 issue of The National Interest, arguing that Krauthammer’s prescriptions posed a fundamental problem of legitimacy for U.S. ambitions. (The problems of cost and wearing down U.S. ground forces would become apparent later.) Fukuyama warned that adopting “Israel’s policy of constantly being on the offensive… does not scale well.” In response, Krauthammer hammered Fukuyama for “Judaizing neoconservatism,” and came close to calling him an anti-Semite.

Krauthammer is now hawkish about the Iranian nuclear program. The unipolar moment is, in his view, being lost, not by overarching ambition, but by the timidity of the Obama administration:

This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat — accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum. Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It’s the perfect fulfillment of Obama’s adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. [“The Fruits of Weakness,” May 21, 2010]