You might want to take a look at this post by Dominic Tierney at The National Interest on America’s need for an enemy:
A threatening rival can also reinforce a sense of national identity. The Harvard political theorist Karl Deutsch described a nation as “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.†According to the political scientist Clinton Rossiter, “There is nothing like an enemy, or simply a neighbor seen as unpleasantly different in political values and social arrangements, to speed a nation along the course of self-identification or put it back on course whenever it strays.â€
The role of foreign peril in cultivating a sense of national identity may be especially important in the United States. American self-identity is not based on an ancient shared heritage, but rather on a set of political ideals: the creed of individual rights and democracy. This is a fragile basis for unity in a continent-sized country populated by huddled masses from all over the world. The existence of the other may be essential to shore up American identity and reinforce a sense of political exceptionalism.
My college education was in part financed by an NDEA loan (National Defense Education Act). The Interstate Highway system, originally called the “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”, was justified as necessary for U. S. defense. Our system of locks, dams, and flood control systems isn’t maintained by a civilian agency. It’s maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Many expensive, large scale government programs in the United States have historically been sold on the basis of national defense. A shrewd politician could sell a national health system on the basis of defense.
Whenever I read analysis of this sort, always sadly, I’m reminded of Walt Kelly’s waggish parody of Oliver Hazard Perry’s message to President Harrison following the Battle of Lake Erie, which Kelly put in the mouth of his Everyman, Pogo Possum: we have met the enemy and he is us.
With ourselves for an enemy we hardly need an external one.
