YES, THEY REALLY DO NEED ENEMIES

Toward the end of his history of conservative intellectuals, Gordon Nash wondered whether or not the movement could survive the collapse of the Soviet Union. To him, the components of the movement could not cohere unless an external threat was present to unite them. Via Sadly, No! I learn that Francis Fukuyama made a similar observation. Here's the video clip and here's a partial transcript:

I think that for some neoconservatives… In a sense, they wanted to have an enemy. The end of the Cold War was a tough time because they didn’t know who the enemy ought to be. I think in the case of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard there was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because I think that they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well if foreign policy wasn’t a big issue.

The late 1990s was the, you know, the period of the stock market bubble and Monica Lewinsky and they didn’t really have an issue in all of that, I thought, that they thought was particularly important or had much traction with the voters and with the public. I think they initially picked on China as their target — and I always thought right from the beginning that was a big mistake because, first of all, foreign policy shouldn’t be driven by the needs of the Republican Party and domestic politics and secondly, I just don’t think that China is particularly useful to think of as an enemy comparable to the former Soviet Union. So in that sense, September the 11th was a big godsend because we were attacked and didn’t have to invent an enemy at that point. But I think that, just that general tendency to think of the world as extremely dangerous and full of big threats is something they try to carry forward.

How far will they go? As far as they think they need to, as Sadly, No! reports:

Defense Officials Tried to Reverse China Policy, Says Powell Aide
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
First posted June 1, 2007 5:48 p.m.


The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.

The top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson’s account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials.

I suppose this explains the bleating that Babbin, Levin and Bennett have done about China.