Thanks Ryan for a thoughtful analysis. The USA in particular has always needed an enemy by means of which to define itself as the guy in the white hat. As circumstances change, the USA discovers new enemies that supposedly present an existential threat, but in reality it's just the same tired old script being played over and over - because it works. Anyone remember how Japan was once the rising power that would (peacefully) obliterate US jobs and cause mass unemployment? Anyone recall how Communism was once going to undermine the land of god, guns, and grotesque obesity? Before that, unchecked hordes of Irish, Jewish, and Chinese immigrants were going to destroy what god had given to white people; and earlier still those pesky natives were impeding Manifest Destiny. Before that, it was the British who were given the black hat to wear.

Perhaps a nation lacking meaningful values of its own (the pursuit of ever more money with which to buy ever more material goods isn't really a sustainable basis for cultural efflorescence) must reduce itself to such infantile binary thinking. But it is a real shame, especially when that nation is the world's most powerful and can impose its paranoid notions wherever it chooses.