Where Is America’s True Enemy?

On May 29 Mitt Romney received more than the 1,144 delegates necessary for the Republican presidential candidate nomination.* This means the American presidential election has entered a standoff between Obama and Romney. The American media generally believes that if Romney is elected, his foreign policy will be even stricter than Obama’s.

Every presidential election year, the two parties offer unbridled hype concerning the so-called enemies of the U.S. and threats towards the U.S. Some American media companies believe that the U.S. seems to have a need to create an enemy from within its heart and that the U.S. has many people that have contracted a serious and not-yet-treated dependence on enemies.

On May 28, “Memorial Day” in the U.S., Romney chose to attack Obama’s national defense policy, claiming, “The world is not safe … [we must] commit to preserve America as the strongest military in the world …” Romney listed Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia and other nations, asserting that these nations constitute threats. In this election, Romney is targeting China’s behavior as having unfavorable influence on the American economy. He has demanded that China “follow the rules” with respect to all aspects that currently harm the American economy, including intellectual property rights, currency regulation, cyber warfare and predatory pricing. Romney stated that, if he were elected, on his first day in office he would classify China as a currency manipulating country.

Last October at the Citadel, Romney made a statement on foreign policy in his speech, describing a still undetermined future for China. This implied that China could possibly constitute an “ideological” threat to America. To counteract this threat, Romney suggested concentrating power on increasing America’s competitiveness and maintaining America’s military dominance. In order to preserve America’s military strength across the world, Romney repeatedly advocated spending a large amount on national defense. Romney’s argument borrowed from Reagan’s “peace through strength,” a prevalent concept in the American government and especially in the Department of Defense.

After the Cold War, American politicians developed a method to promote the “American enemy.” First, they disseminated information that these “enemies” pose great threats to the safety of America. Then, they tried their hardest to defame these “enemies” while making themselves look better, thus giving the American people the impression that the struggle between America and these “enemies” is a fight between good and evil. President Bush’s proposed “axis of evil” was just like this. Nowadays, American politicians want to fit China into this mold.

In actuality, the creation of an enemy is not only used by politicians to incite emotions among the public and shift their attention away from domestic problems in order to win votes, it also corresponds with the media’s need to attract viewers and earn profits. And behind all this there is still a huge benefit to the American “military-industrial complex.” The “military-industrial complex” is a concept former president Eisenhower proposed in “Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation” on Jan. 17, 1961. Eisenhower used this term to express the unification of a nation’s military institutions and military enterprise. Over the last 60 years, war and the arms race have used the military-industrial complex to take more than $20 trillion in national defense expenditures from the government; thus, the military-industrial complex has become an American special interest group that relies on war and the arms race. More importantly, in present day America, politicians, the media, and the military-industrial complex have already begun to join together.

Who is America’s enemy? The opinions that many domestic American intellectuals have raised are actually quite insightful. In its May/June issue, America’s Foreign Policy magazine published the article “The Enemy Within” by CEO and Editor-in-Chief David Rothkopf. He pointed out: “Since the end of the Cold War, America has been on a relentless search for enemies. But the real dangers are at home.” He drew up this metaphor: “The United States is a bit like a 375-pound, middle-aged man with a heart condition walking down a city street at night eating a Big Mac. He’s sweating profusely because he’s afraid he might get mugged. But the thing that’s going to kill him is the burger.” The article went a step further, stating: “China may be a rising power that often disagrees with the United States, but the two countries’ economies are deeply interdependent. China has little history of global adventurism, and though it is a large country with a large economy, it is also still a very poor one focused on its own social problems.”

The end of the article even more sharply points out: “By far, the greatest threats to the United States right now are internal ones — like that Big Mac. They don’t come from terrorists. They come from political obstructionists and know-nothings who are blocking needed economic and political reforms, whether fixing a health-care system that poses a debt threat many times greater than the immense U.S. budget deficit or tackling the growing inequality in American society or overhauling the United States’ money-corrupted, dysfunctional political process. If America stopped searching for goblins under the bed, it might actually be able to reset its economic priorities and start investing in the things that would make the country stronger, more prosperous, and safer again, from infrastructure to energy security to better schools. What’s more, Americans might find that a foreign policy that identified real risks but kept them in perspective and was more about deepening ties, finding common ground, and avoiding unnecessary conflict would work better than the tired us vs. them formulations of the recent past.”

We can borrow a saying from the popular American cartoon animal Pogo to remind some Americans: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Editor’s Note: Romney is currently only the presumptive Republican nominee.