Listening to the columnist Charles Krauthammer 's speech -- which embraced the doctrine of pre-emption and asserted that the toppling of Saddam Hussein had made America safer -- he says he '' could not understand why everyone around me was applauding the speech enthusiastically , given that the United States had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq , was bogged down in a vicious insurgency , and had almost totally isolated itself from the rest of the world by following the kind of unipolar strategy advocated by Krauthammer . ''