Goering answered:
Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war, either in Russia or in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…That is easy. All you have to tell them is that they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.{37}
George Kennan, American diplomat, historian and expert on Soviet policies, expressed a similar idea long ago:
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.{38}
British political commentator Andrew Marr expressed in 1993 what few in Europe dared to say in public, namely that “fear holds the key to the future of NATO.” This was actually the title of his article in the Independent (London). He wrote:
Military alliances are as keen as anyone to cloak themselves in happy-clappy idealism. But they are not kept together by that: they are cemented and underpinned by fear. NATO, whose foreign ministers met yesterday before its summit in January, is searching for a role in the language of democracy and fraternity. But what it really needs to thrive are more fear-soaked nightmares among its people.{39}
Author Webster G. Tarpley explains how a perceived external threat provides cohesion to societies, particularly those ruled by an oligarchy:
It is from [Carl] Schmitt that Samuel Huntington got his idea that an enemy image is absolutely necessary for the cohesion of any society. In reality, however, it is primarily an oligarchical society which requires an enemy image, because that society is based on an irrational principle of domination which cannot stand the scrutiny it would receive in peacetime. George Orwell understood this aspect well when he suggested in 1984 that the endless war among Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was really a war waged by each of these states against its own population, for the purpose of perpetuating a hierarchical society.{40}
(5) Searching for a new adversary
As the Soviet Bloc disintegrated, Western strategists began looking for a new threat perception that would provide the Western alliance with a long-term focus for foreign policy. In his book, aptly called A Search for Enemies, published in 1991, Ted Carpenter wrote:
Since the Soviet Union’s East European empire began to unravel in the summer of 1989, Bush administration officials and numerous members of the foreign policy community have conducted a frantic search for alternative justifications for the [Atlantic] alliance. The range of suggestions NATO’s supporters have made is testimony to both their creativity and their desperation.{41}
At the time his book was published, the ruling elite in the U.S. had not yet openly identified a threat that could credibly replace that of the Soviet Bloc:
The best they have been able to come up with on short notice is the need to keep the bulk of Washington’s security commitments intact to guard against instability, unpredictability, and uncertainty. Such vague “threats” obviously lack the visceral impact or credibility of a large expansionist enemy such as the Soviet Union.{42}
Robert W. Tucker, writing already in 1990 in Foreign Affairs, pointed out that to maintain the Western alliance, “a new adversary must be assumed.”{43}
Foreign policy and military experts identified in the early 90s a garden-variety of potential threats to perceived U.S. interests – so-called rogue states, the drug trade, threats to sources of raw materials, access to Mid-East oil, terrorism and more – none of which could have provided a focus for American foreign policy.
The communiqué of the North Atlantic Council of 6-7 June 1991 stressed that NATO members prepare to address “other unpredictable developments that are beyond the focus of traditional Alliance concerns, but that can have direct implications on our security” and the “need to address broader issues and new global challenges.”{44} The Council did not specify any global challenges that could in the future have direct implications on NATO members’ security.
Phil Williams, Paul Hammond and Michael Brenner elaborated in 1993 on the need for public legitimation to maintain U.S. leadership in NATO: “Another difficulty with the effort to maintain U.S. leadership in NATO is that of domestic legitimacy… Preserving an alliance without an enemy and a strategy without a threat will not be easy…Without an external threat that acts as rallying point, unifying focus and target, the rampant pluralism and sectionalism of the U.S. political system may be impossible to overcome.”{45}
Both NATO hesitations and the Defense Planning Guidance suggest a frantic search for justifications to maintain or even extend the role of the Western Alliance. Yet the threats listed in official documents appear surprisingly vague, as discussed earlier with relation to the Defense Planning Guidance. Some even appear puzzlingly implausible.
Peter Jenkins, writing in The Independent in November 1991, illustrated the confusion prevailing at the time:
Suppose in the circumstances of today an American president were to propose contributing a 150,000- strong standing army to a military alliance for the purpose of defending Western Europe. Defend it against what, Congress would want to know? ...in the long run it is difficult to see how its cohesion [of NATO] can survive in the absence of any coherent external threat. Islamic fundamentalism is an alarming and destabilising force in the world, but can we imagine seriously the Muslim hordes once more at the gates of Vienna or Warsaw? Russia, more plausibly, could degenerate into a morbidly nationalistic state heavily armed with nuclear weapons, but it is hard to imagine such a Russia embarking on a course of western expansionism. Proliferation of nuclear weapons around the Mediterranean, or even further afield, in time may give new relevance to the doctrine of minimal nuclear deterrence towards which Nato is implicitly moving. Yet these contingencies do not mix into a cement of threat in any way comparable to the Soviet menace as construed during the Cold War.{46}
(6) The ideal threat perception: Focused, durable, credible, useful
(a) A focused threat
Foreign policy commentators have for decades called for, and often lamented the lack of, a coherent and focused foreign policy.
In 1993 the editorial of the Christian Science Monitor called for a “more certain foreign policy in which American power and purpose are aligned” and deplored that the “White House still lacks a focused foreign policy.”{47}
In 1994, Walter R. Mears, vice president of Associated Press, cited President Clinton saying that “without a disciplined, focused foreign policy, overseas problems would swarm in and divert him from the home-front issues he wants to handle.”{48}
In 1995 we have Sen. McCain criticizing President Clinton for a “ lack of focus and a lack of priority and threats by the President of the United States to send us -- our American troops -- almost anywhere....There's got to be a more coherent and focused foreign policy so the American people are comfortable as to where their young men and women might go.”{49}
In 1998, R.C. Longworth, senior writer of the Chicago Tribune wrote: “When everything is important, nothing has priority. Various think tanks and seminars have tried to outline a focused foreign policy for a post-Cold War America, with limited impact. [...]