"We need a common enemy to unite us"
About this Quote
It is one of the bleakest truths of coalition politics: solidarity is easiest when it has a target. Coming from Condoleezza Rice, a chief architect and defender of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy, the line reads less like idle cynicism and more like a strategic diagnosis of how nations and institutions actually cohere. In the wake of the Cold War, the West lost its organizing story. After 9/11, it found a new one, with all the moral urgency and policy latitude that crisis provides.
The intent is practical: unity is hard work; fear is a shortcut. A "common enemy" compresses disagreement, disciplines dissent, and simplifies budgets and alliances into a single narrative of necessity. It turns messy pluralism into a rally, which is politically efficient and rhetorically clean. The subtext is the uncomfortable admission that shared values often fail to do what shared threats can. Rice is naming the emotional infrastructure behind grand strategy: identity is frequently built by opposition.
That candor also exposes the hazard. If unity requires an enemy, leaders have an incentive to keep danger on the horizon, to cast ambiguity as menace, to treat complexity as weakness. The enemy can be real, exaggerated, or opportunistically chosen; the mechanism works either way. The line’s power is its compressed realism: it captures how democracies, too, can drift toward coherence through antagonism, and how the language of security can become a kind of social glue - strong enough to bind, strong enough to blind.
The intent is practical: unity is hard work; fear is a shortcut. A "common enemy" compresses disagreement, disciplines dissent, and simplifies budgets and alliances into a single narrative of necessity. It turns messy pluralism into a rally, which is politically efficient and rhetorically clean. The subtext is the uncomfortable admission that shared values often fail to do what shared threats can. Rice is naming the emotional infrastructure behind grand strategy: identity is frequently built by opposition.
That candor also exposes the hazard. If unity requires an enemy, leaders have an incentive to keep danger on the horizon, to cast ambiguity as menace, to treat complexity as weakness. The enemy can be real, exaggerated, or opportunistically chosen; the mechanism works either way. The line’s power is its compressed realism: it captures how democracies, too, can drift toward coherence through antagonism, and how the language of security can become a kind of social glue - strong enough to bind, strong enough to blind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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