Not just for what he thought, but for how

Charles Krauthammer, who died last June at the age of 68, was the most important political columnist of the post–Cold War era. In fact, he gave that era its name. In an essay for Foreign Affairs published in its winter 1990/1991 issue, Krauthammer pronounced the dawn of a unipolar moment, when American political, economic, military, and cultural power went unchallenged. In subsequent essays and articles, he articulated a foreign policy of democratic realism by which the United States might prolong the unipolar moment as it pursued the ambitious and controversial goal of what he called “universal dominion.”

Yet Krauthammer was also …