A moderate liberal who turned independent conservative as a political pundit, Krauthammer won the Pulitzer Prize for his columns in The Washington Post in 1987.

[5] After spending 14 months recovering in a hospital, he returned to medical school, graduating to become a psychiatrist involved in the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III in 1980.

[6] His father, Shulim Krauthammer (November 23, 1904 – June 1987),[citation needed] was from Bolekhiv, Ukraine (then the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and later became a naturalized citizen of France.

"[20] The following year, after graduating from McGill, he studied as a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, before returning to the United States to attend medical school at Harvard.

During his time as chief resident, he noted a variant of manic depression (bipolar disorder) that he identified and named secondary mania.

Krauthammer coined and developed the term Reagan Doctrine in 1985, and he defined the U.S. role as sole superpower in his essay "The Unipolar Moment", published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

[27] In 1990, Krauthammer became a panelist for the weekly PBS political roundtable Inside Washington, remaining with the show until it ceased production in December 2013.

[29] His son Daniel is responsible for the final edits on a book that was posthumously released, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors, that was published in December 2018.

[33] He was co-founder of Pro Musica Hebraica, a not-for-profit organization devoted to presenting Jewish classical music, much of it lost or forgotten, in a concert hall setting.

Mitch McConnell,[37] Chris Wallace,[38] David Nakamura,[38] Megyn Kelly,[39] John Roberts,[39] Bret Baier, Mike Pence, and others paid tribute to him.

He supported relaxing the Bush administration's limits on federal funding of discarded human embryonic stem cell research.

A fellow member of the council, Janet D. Rowley, insists that Krauthammer's vision was still an issue far in the future and not a topic to be discussed at the present time.

[50] Krauthammer was critical of the idea of living wills and the current state of end-of-life counseling and feared that Obamacare would just worsen the situation: When my father was dying, my mother and brother and I had to decide how much treatment to pursue.

What was a better way to ascertain my father's wishes: What he checked off on a form one fine summer's day years before being stricken; or what we, who had known him intimately for decades, thought he would want?

[citation needed] In "The Poverty of Realism" (New Republic, February 17, 1986), he asserted: that the end of American foreign policy is not just the security of the United States, but what John F. Kennedy called "the success of liberty."

While he supported the 1991 Gulf War on the grounds of both humanitarianism and strategic necessity (preventing Saddam Hussein from gaining control of the Persian Gulf and its resources), he opposed American intervention in the Yugoslav Wars on the grounds that America should not be committing the lives of its soldiers to purely humanitarian missions in which there is no American national interest at stake.

More recently, they have been joined by "realists, newly mugged by reality" such as Condoleezza Rice, Richard Cheney, and George W. Bush, who "have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers' past experience, more mature".

[68] When Richard Goldstone retracted the claim 1+1⁄2 years after the issuance of the UN report on the 2008 Gaza war that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians,[69] including children, Krauthammer strongly criticized Goldstone, saying that "this weasel-y excuse-laden retraction is too little and too late" and called "the original report a blood libel ranking with the libels of the 19th century in which Jews were accused of ritually slaughtering children in order to use the blood in rituals".

[70] Krauthammer laid out the underlying principle of strategic necessity restraining democratic idealism in his controversial 2004 Kristol Award Lecture: "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 mortal threat to freedom.

On September 12, 2001, he wrote that, if the suspicion that bin Laden was behind the attack proved correct, the United States had no choice but to go to war in Afghanistan.

[71] He supported the Second Iraq War on the "realist" grounds of the strategic threat the Saddam regime posed to the region as UN sanctions were eroding and of his alleged weapons of mass destruction and on the "idealist" grounds that a self-sustaining democracy in Iraq would be a first step toward changing the poisonous political culture of tyranny, intolerance, and religious fanaticism in the Arab world that had incubated the anti-American extremism from which 9/11 emerged.

He continued: "I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time.

Nonetheless, I can both understand and respect those few Democrats who make the principled argument against war with Iraq on the grounds of deterrence, believing that safety lies in reliance on a proven (if perilous) balance of terror rather than the risky innovation of forcible disarmament by preemption.

It's not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world—oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.

[75] In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in Philadelphia, he argued that the beginnings of democratization in the Arab world had been met in 2006 with a "fierce counterattack" by radical Islamist forces in Lebanon, Palestine, and especially Iraq, which witnessed a major intensification in sectarian warfare.

[84][85] A few days before the 2012 United States presidential election, Krauthammer predicted it would be "very close" with Republican candidate Mitt Romney winning the "popular [vote] by, I think, about half a point, Electoral College probably a very narrow margin".

Krauthammer was critical of intelligent design, "a self-enclosed, tautological 'theory' whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge — in this case, evolution — they are to be filled by God.

What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein?

[94] Krauthammer criticized President George W. Bush's 2005 nomination of Harriet Miers to succeed Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

"[96] Six days later, Miers withdrew, employing that argument: As I stated in my acceptance remarks in the Oval Office, the strength and independence of our three branches of government are critical to the continued success of this great Nation.