Clearly, the basic personality of the enemy is always Hitler, and he always exhibits the same demonic cruelty, the same maniacal aggressiveness, and the same psychotic ambitions as Der Fuhrer. Islamic fundamentalism seemed for a while to be a very credible enemy, especially after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, but it soon faded after the Oklahoma City bombing. Transnational organized crime is perhaps a more plausible enemy, although it too lacks a conveniently defined face. Drug smuggling, arms smuggling, and people who smoke cigarettes on international air flights seem to compete for the role of the foe against whom our military, political, economic, and intelligence resources must be mobilized. A few years ago, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry explicitly identified transnational crime as the new enemy.
Organized crime is the new communism, the new monolithic threat.
All that is lacking is a large photograph of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Libertarians who refused to see an enemy in the Soviet Union argued that an enemy was invented for the purpose of justifying the vast enlargement of the federal state in the wake of World War II and for the perpetuation of the state machinery established during the earlier conflict. But even if their premise, that the Soviets were really not an enemy, is wrong, their conclusion contains a great deal of truth. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. The strategy by which Cold War liberals sought to fight communism, then, was simply an extension of their strategy for domestic social reform, and it promised much the same rewards for the bureaucratic and managerial elites that were to supervise it.