Do We Really Need A New Enemy?

By Charles Krauthammer

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.

To be sure, some cold warriors have gone nativist. Pat Buchanan, most notably, has with gusto reverted to pre-Pearl Harbor isolationism and protectionism. Yet despite his modest electoral success, Buchanan is something of an exception: most conservatives do not embrace his apostasy from President Reagan's free-trading internationalism.

For now the locus of organized political xenophobia is the Democratic Congress. Gephardt has introduced a bill mandating that Japan eliminate its ) trade surplus with the U.S. in five years -- or face huge cuts in the number of cars it may export to the U.S. By this logic, shouldn't Europe cut off its imports from America unless the U.S. reduces its $16 billion trade surplus with Europe? Indeed, if every country went Gephardt and decreed zero trade balances, international commerce would come to a halt.

But Japan bashing in Congress is not a matter of logic. It is a matter of politics. After years of being pummeled for their fecklessness on national defense, Democrats see a chance to reacquire nationalist credentials by bashing a group of well-chosen, historically distrusted foreigners.

To which old cold warriors, Democrat and Republican, must say: Enough. One cold war per lifetime is enough. For 45 years, with the Soviet empire on the march, the U.S. was right to pursue a policy aggressively nationalist and strongly anti-Soviet to protect itself and its values. But that victory is won, and the U.S. now has other roles.

First: using its pre-eminent military power to protect itself and its friends from the small outlaw states, the Iraqs, of the future. Second: helping preserve the harmony and coherence of the grand Western alliance that won the cold war yesterday and ensures the peace of the world today. The world relies on the U.S., still the leading industrial power, to keep alive the free-trade regime America created after World War II; to oversee the intertwining of Western societies, economies, cultures and technologies; and, more generally, to see to it that the triumph of the West is not dissipated in mindless, destructive nationalism.

The law of conservation of national hostility suggests that the enmity once reserved for the truly evil (Soviet) empire be redeployed against a Japanese ally whose offenses are those of productive efficiency and commercial zeal. It's a lousy law. We would do well to repeal it.