TERRIBLE THING NOT TO HAVE A U.S. ENEMY

It's a terrible thing not to have an enemy. It's a terrible thing losing a Red Menace that could unite the free world in philosophical and political lock-step. It's a terrible thing when democratic nations think for themselves and find that greater greed outweighs greater good.

Take a look at Germany. Before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, before all this freedom stuff ran amuck, West Germany had it made. German competitiveness assured a leadership position in world markets. Living was easy. German finance dominated the continent. German education was deemed superior. Through it all, the United States guaranteed Germany's security and relieved Germany of the enormous expense and the hostility that would be created by a rearmed Germany.

When the wall fell, so did Germany as we had known it. Unemployment soared. The immigration question, long simmering below the surface, came to a front-and-center boil. The East Germans, once considered long-lost brothers, became long-lasting burdens. The notion of incomparable German efficiency was called into question. Even the previously esteemed educational system started to be considered notoriously slow and accused of churning out too many unemployable university graduates and too few technically trained white and blue collar workers needed to perform ever more sophisticated jobs.

The German president, Richard von Weizsacker, states, "Industry and the economy are stuck in a cost and innovation crisis, the political class in a credibility crisis and society in an orientation crisis. If we do not want to fall behind our competition in Asia and now in Europe (Note: no mention of the United States), we have to be more open to structural change. We have to dismantle many structures that run counter to innovation and investment."

The truth is that the same forces that were ripping apart the atrophied political, military and economic formulations in the Communist world were also eating away these same structures in the democracies. Nationalism arises. Ancient ethnic and religious quarrels emerge. Isolationism takes root.

Western solidarity is shaky. The world trading system is in trouble. The unifying nature of NATO has disappeared.

It's a terrible thing not to have any enemy.

With the Soviet Union gone, Germany has lost its one great fear and acquired a bundle of dispiriting agonies. Those immigrants, for example: not only the 1.8 million Turkish residents but the tens of thousands of Balts, Poles, Slavs and others pouring in from Eastern Europe. Most decent Germans would denounce the neo-Nazi fire-bombing of the Turkish family near Cologne. But even the most decent Germans, the vast majority, feel that the country will be much better off if it seals its borders and keeps out "those foreigners."

Then you have the former East Germans "lazy and ill-trained," as they are deemed in Frankfurt. Why should we West Germans hand all that we worked so hard to build to the "Ossies" on a silver platter? Are these people really our brothers? Hasn't a half century under an alien system made them a people apart?

Germany and the rest of the free world has lost the unifying force of fear. When you are no longer fixated on a looming, all-powerful enemy, dozens of pent-up anxieties are unleashed. The world may be safer, but it is not happier. It's a terrible thing not to have an enemy.