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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 76

Do We Really Need A New Enemy?


By Charles Krauthammer


    Is there a law of conservation of national hostility?
Just days after the demise of their enemy of the last
half-century, Americans seem desperate to conjure a new one. An
early attempt by Hollywood to make Colombian drug lords the
national villains failed for lack of credibility. The emerging
consensus is that Moscow's successor in infamy is Tokyo, which
stands accused of mercilessly shelling the U.S. with reliable
cars.

    Japan bashing has become a national sport. Richard
Gephardt, whose 1988 presidential campaign pioneered
postcommunist xenophobia, gave us a precursor of the game with
his anti-Korea TV ads. Michael Dukakis got more to the point
with a campaign ad featuring an ominously rising sun. Now even
a sensible moderate like Bob Kerrey goes on TV openly exhorting
his countrymen to "Fight back, America," leaving little doubt
as to whom we are to fight now that the Soviets are no more.

    But it was President Bush, lifelong internationalist, who
cynically gave license to this new and ugly American mood with
his disgraceful trip to Japan, a begging and bullying expedition
that legitimized the rush to find the source of America's
troubles abroad.

    It did not take long for the rest of the country to read
his lips. Within two weeks, Los Angeles County abruptly
canceled a perfectly legitimate railcar contract with Sumitomo,
a Japanese company. Next, major-league baseball reacted with
disdain to a Japanese offer to buy the failing Seattle baseball
team. Baseball, said the game's commissioner, countenanced only
North American ownership. It is a rather odd America-first
policy that counts Canada as an American appendage. Odd too that
a sport so bent on maintaining national purity should play in
a park where Barry Bonds is announced as the "voltigeur de
gauche" and the foul lines are demarcated in meters.

    But Montrealers, you see, are not inscrutable. They just
would not work as villains. A Michael Crichton thriller in which
the heavy is a crafty Quebecois? Not a chance. Instead Crichton
rides the zeitgeist to the top of the charts with Rising Sun, a
best seller whose No. 1 villain is quite simply Japan and things
Japanese.

    During the cold war, one of the left's more common
calumnies was that cold warriors carried on against the Soviets
because of some desperate psychological need for an enemy.
Indeed, went the charge, Ronald Reagan and his ilk demonized the
Soviet Union -- "evil empire" was a designation received with
scorn in better circles -- to satisfy a deep Manichaean need for
a world of black and white.

    This charge was always nonsense, but cold warriors never
imagined they would ever have the chance to prove it. Now they
do. The coldest of cold warriors are among those advocating the
most radical and generous embrace of the erstwhile enemy.
Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb and Dr. Strangelove himself,
calls Western assistance for Russia more justified than even the
Marshall Plan. Richard Nixon, lifelong anticommunist, pushes
massive Western aid and debt relief for Russia. One high Reagan
Administration official, Fred Ikle, has gone so far as to
propose a "defense community" between America and Russia modeled
on the one France created with Germany after World War II.

    To be sure, some cold warriors have gone nativist. Pat
Buchanan, most notably, has with gusto reverted to pre-Pearl
Harbor isolationism and protectionism. Yet despite his modest
electoral success, Buchanan is something of an exception: most
conservatives do not embrace his apostasy from President
Reagan's free-trading internationalism.

    For now the locus of organized political xenophobia is the
Democratic Congress. Gephardt has introduced a bill mandating
that Japan eliminate its trade surplus with the U.S. in five
years -- or face huge cuts in the number of cars it may export
to the U.S. By this logic, shouldn't Europe cut off its imports
from America unless the U.S. reduces its $16 billion trade
surplus with Europe? Indeed, if every country went Gephardt and
decreed zero trade balances, international commerce would come
to a halt.

    But Japan bashing in Congress is not a matter of logic. It
is a matter of politics. After years of being pummeled for
their fecklessness on national defense, Democrats see a chance
to reacquire nationalist credentials by bashing a group of
well-chosen, historically distrusted foreigners.

    To which old cold warriors, Democrat and Republican, must
say: Enough. One cold war per lifetime is enough. For 45 years,
with the Soviet empire on the march, the U.S. was right to
pursue a policy aggressively nationalist and strongly
anti-Soviet to protect itself and its values. But that victory
is won, and the U.S. now has other roles.

    First: using its pre-eminent military power to protect
itself and its friends from the small outlaw states, the Iraqs,
of the future. Second: helping preserve the harmony and
coherence of the grand Western alliance that won the cold war
yesterday and ensures the peace of the world today. The world
relies on the U.S., still the leading industrial power, to keep
alive the free-trade regime America created after World War II;
to oversee the intertwining of Western societies, economies,
cultures and technologies; and, more generally, to see to it
that the triumph of the West is not dissipated in mindless,
destructive nationalism.

    The law of conservation of national hostility suggests
that the enmity once reserved for the truly evil (Soviet)
empire be redeployed against a Japanese ally whose offenses are
those of productive efficiency and commercial zeal. It's a lousy
law. We would do well to repeal it.