It is in this context that the creation of international enemies is the last bastion of the regime's ability to hold on to power.
The creation of an enemy is a move beloved of governments the world over.
She writes that the arms race is driven by a "technological imperative" which requires the creation of an enemy as a permanent social institution: Modern weapons technologies, including the required research and development, are particularly capital-intensive and costly.
It is no coincidence, said Ebadi, that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War came the creation of a new enemy in Islam.
That was a conscious demonization, conscious creation of the "image of an enemy" which had to justify huge military expenditures for the taxpayers and, say, a necessity to send their sons to shed blood in Vietnam.
Frankly, this excellent exhibit should be required viewing for Americans: The parallels to strategies used by the Trump administration — mass rallies, creation of false "enemies," discrediting the media with claims of "fake" news — are truly alarming.
The only thing stress-rolling accomplishes is the creation of new enemies out of old allies (or potential allies) -- a classic lose-lose situation.
From the start, Trump's campaign relied on a core constituency of beleaguered blue-collar voters — "the people," Mao would have surely termed them — whose economic distress he masterfully channelled toward the creation of loathsome villains, the enemy.
Semantic games and the creation of menacing enemies have been standard political tactics by candidates of all ideologies ever since someone first got the idea that leaders could be chosen, not born.
The notion that it was above all, or unusually, decadent was a creation of its enemies, who defined the creative energies of cosmopolitanism in that way.
