COLUMN LEFT : The Dearth of Suitable Villains : From narco-terrorists to the Japanese, our efforts to find a post-Cold War enemy fail.

The advertising industry’s Andy award this summer went to a funny series of TV spots in which suitably dubbed stock footage had Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro appearing to sing the praises of Stroh’s beer. Not only is communism dead, in other words; the enemies of the Cold War years, on whom the United States’ identity as a superpower rested, have become a joke.

Who is to take their place? The United States now proposes to expand its role as the world’s policeman, but against whom? Selecting a convincing enemy is not easy: it means bringing mass public attitudes into line behind the interests of political elites, and sustaining the hostility over time. None of the candidates that have been floated during the first two years of the Bush Administration pass the test.

The Narco - Terrorist: This, feeding on the horror of the streets and reinforced by “Miami Vice” and James Bond movies, undoubtedly has the broadest resonance in the popular culture. But as mainspring of foreign policy, it may have a decidedly short shelf life. Panama’s Manuel Noriega, while he lasted, was a serviceable villain; public opinion was receptive to the Pentagon propagandists who combed his living quarters and came up with red underwear, voodoo paraphernalia and portraits of Hitler. But the spasm was too brief. The stash of cocaine found in Noriega’s freezer turned out, as the Pentagon belatedly admitted, to be tamale flour.

Panama, thanks to its geographical location and the generosity of its banking laws, is once again awash with drugs. And the defense interests who saw the drug war in the Andes as a new pretext for military budgets now see richer pickings in a prolonged presence in the gulf.

The Evil Arab: The prevalence of crude “towel-head” cartoons and the commentators’ talk of the labyrinthine intrigues of the bazaar and the rug merchants hint at the depth of racial animus at work here. But there are serious flaws. The biggest is that the U.S. political Establishment itself has been seriously divided by the gulf buildup, with the proponents of long-term alliance with the conservative Arab states now firmly in the saddle. The United States’ most vital allies are now some of the very Arabs who inspire the cartoonists’ most bigoted slurs.

The wave of indiscriminate threats against Arab-Americans shows that much of the public has a hard time telling a Kuwaiti from a Moroccan (or, for that matter, a non-Arab Iranian). This can only be made worse by an official policy of simple expediency, which yesterday befriended Saddam Hussein as a counterweight to the hated Iranians and now makes common cause with Syria’s Hafez Assad. If Saddam is Hitler, Assad must at least qualify as Mussolini.

The Scheming Japanese: Economist Pat Choate’s book “Agents of Influence,” which attacks the allegedly unfair business practices of Japanese lobbyists, is the hit of the political-literary season. Such seeds fall on fertile ground. As John Dower of the University of California has pointed out in his splendid history of the Pacific theater, “War Without Mercy,” the image of the Japanese as cunning simians has a long and nasty history.

There is considerable hostility to Japan, which relies on the gulf for two-thirds of its oil, for its reluctance to pay the costs of U.S. police operations, and many of the cartoons, with their “Velly solly, honorable Japanese cannot pay” themes, smack of the racism that Dower describes.

But again, at neither an elite nor a popular level is there a firm anti-Japanese consensus. Choate’s book was trashed by Michael Kinsley in the New Republic as “a Potemkin Village of misleading anecdotes and half-true statistics.” True, 39% of respondents in a new Times Mirror poll have a negative view of Japan. But American voters, who tend to register their views most eloquently with their credit cards, appear to believe that the main sin of the Japanese in the age of Toyota’s Lexus and Nissan’s Infiniti is to have outperformed the United States at its own game--capitalism.

The Soviet Union worked so well as an adversary because it convinced Americans of their strength and virtue. Russians had nothing Americans wanted. But these fleeting new enemies have the opposite effect. Drawing on free-floating racist stereotypes and ancient strands of know-nothingism in U.S. culture, they evoke a kind of generalized fear of the dark. They work by displacing anxieties about America’s weakness and vulnerability--the drug-induced chaos of its inner cities, its addiction to cheap energy, its failures in investment and technology.

The last thing these new images of the enemy suggest is the world view of a self-confident global power.