In Chapter 10 of Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? the topic of America as a nation with no enemy is discussed. After the Cold War, as Huntington describes, America was left with no enemy with the destruction of the Soviet Union which caused some problems. Historically, many nations have suffered after the destruction of their major enemies due to the lack of motivation and heat that the rivalry provided for the citizens. This makes sense because competition encourages growth and novel ideas and innovations, so with no competitor a country is left with no reason to strive to create something new. Huntington gave examples such as the Roman Republic which collapsed to Caesarism after defeating its final enemy, Mithradates. Of course, the country left with no enemy is not the only one that suffers in such a situation. When the Soviet Union was defeated it was left with no true, uniting identity, causing the dispersion of all the individual states.
One of the main reasons that these conflicts were in place originally was the fundamental ideological differences between each country. On page 261 Huntington quotes David Kennedy saying, “Whether the enemy was German ‘Kaiserism’ in World War I, Japanese regimentation in World War II, or Russian collectivist communism in the Cold War, a central component of the American definition of the adversary had to do with the enemy’s embodiment of anti-individualist values.” This statement embodies the many ways in which large American conflicts were centered around idealisms.