Do We Really Need A New Enemy?

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Is there a law of conservation of national hostility? Just days after the demise of their enemy of the last half-century, Americans seem desperate to conjure a new one. An early attempt by Hollywood to make Colombian drug lords the national villains failed for lack of credibility. The emerging consensus is that Moscow's successor in infamy is Tokyo, which stands accused of mercilessly shelling the U.S. with reliable cars.

Japan bashing has become a national sport. Richard Gephardt, whose 1988 presidential campaign pioneered postcommunist xenophobia, gave us a precursor of the game with his anti-Korea TV ads. Michael Dukakis got more to the point with a campaign ad featuring an ominously rising sun. Now even a sensible moderate like Bob Kerrey goes on TV openly exhorting his countrymen to "Fight back, America," leaving little doubt as to whom we are to fight now that the Soviets are no more.

But it was President Bush, lifelong internationalist, who cynically gave license to this new and ugly American mood with his disgraceful trip to Japan, a begging and bullying expedition that legitimized the rush to find the source of America's troubles abroad.

It did not take long for the rest of the country to read his lips. Within two weeks, Los Angeles County abruptly canceled a perfectly legitimate railcar contract with Sumitomo, a Japanese company. Next, major-league baseball reacted with disdain to a Japanese offer to buy the failing Seattle baseball team. Baseball, said the game's commissioner, countenanced only North American ownership. It is a rather odd America-first policy that counts Canada as an American appendage. Odd too that a sport so bent on maintaining national purity should play in a park where Barry Bonds is announced as the "voltigeur de gauche" and the foul lines are demarcated in meters.

But Montrealers, you see, are not inscrutable. They just would not work as villains. A Michael Crichton thriller in which the heavy is a crafty Quebecois? Not a chance. Instead Crichton rides the zeitgeist to the top of the charts with Rising Sun, a best seller whose No. 1 villain is quite simply Japan and things Japanese.

During the cold war, one of the left's more common calumnies was that cold warriors carried on against the Soviets because of some desperate psychological need for an enemy. Indeed, went the charge, Ronald Reagan and his ilk demonized the Soviet Union -- "evil empire" was a designation received with scorn in better circles -- to satisfy a deep Manichaean need for a world of black and white.

This charge was always nonsense, but cold warriors never imagined they would ever have the chance to prove it. Now they do. The coldest of cold warriors are among those advocating the most radical and generous embrace of the erstwhile enemy. Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb and Dr. Strangelove himself, calls Western assistance for Russia more justified than even the Marshall Plan. Richard Nixon, lifelong anticommunist, pushes massive Western aid and debt relief for Russia. One high Reagan Administration official, Fred Ikle, has gone so far as to propose a "defense community" between America and Russia modeled on the one France created with Germany after World War II.