Foreign policy, domestic discourse and mass media have often coincided in the identification of “acceptable” external American enemies, both vilified and stereotyped, with potentially painful consequences for those who might be associated with these groups within the US. The culture of the select reviled enemy as global metaphor for American identity pervaded wartime propaganda of the twentieth century which vilified the Spanish, Turks, Germans and Japanese. In the last case, racial features were cruelly caricatured even as the rights of resident Japanese Americans were trampled on by their confinement in concentration camps. In the Cold War, this sense of a powerful foe focused on communism—the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, the nearby threat of Cuba and continuous concerns with Asian enemies—Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean.

With the collapse of many communist regimes, the question of “suitable” foreign enemies has become more ambiguous for politicians and media. Lethal Weapon II (1989), for example, turned to white South Africans; Russian mobsters have become frequent villains for movies and television (The Saint, 1997; NBC’s Law and Order, 1990–). Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega have also been cast as arch-enemies, as were Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbs amidst ongoing Balkan conflicts (a sense of “enemyship” was parodied in the 1997 film Wag the Dog, which created a fictional engagement and heroic actions in Albania). The need for and manipulation of enemies remains fundamental to American politics, whether justifying military expenditures or actions abroad, or in defining the American dream against those denied some aspect of it.

Yet these images continue to cause deep conflicts within a multicultural society. For example, 1999 congressional and FBI concerns about Chinese espionage in American nuclear research evoked a specter of an inscrutable Asian enemy and divided loyalties that deeply worried Americans of Asian descent, among others.