Justice & Law Quote by Richard Perle

Power, in Perle's framing, is less a set of institutions than a storyline that needs villains to keep the plot moving. Dictatorship isn’t sustained by charisma alone; it’s sustained by a continuous state of emergency. The line’s blunt symmetry (internal enemies, external enemies) exposes the machinery: fear at home licenses surveillance, fear abroad licenses militarization. Each “must” lands like a bureaucratic inevitability, stripping tyranny of its mystique and recasting it as political maintenance work.

The subtext is a warning about how easily threat narratives can become self-fulfilling. If a regime requires enemies to function, it will manufacture them when they’re scarce: dissent becomes “subversion,” minorities become “fifth columns,” neighboring states become existential threats. The secret police and the standing army don’t merely respond to danger; they need danger to justify their budgets, their powers, their intrusions. Enemies are not incidental to authoritarianism; they’re its renewable resource.

Context matters because Perle is not a neutral theorist but a long-time American defense official and prominent hawk, someone steeped in Cold War logic and later the post-9/11 security mindset. That gives the quote an edge: it’s both an indictment of dictators and a mirror held up to any security state tempted to treat perpetual threat as governance. The line works because it doesn’t argue morality; it describes incentives. Once politics is organized around fear, peace becomes politically inconvenient.