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The notorious Nazi leader Hermann Goering believed that any population can be induced to support war if presented with the perception of a credible external threat. During the war crimes trial at Nuremberg (1946), psychologist Gustave Gilbert visited Goering in his cell. Gilbert wrote in his diary, later published in book form:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

Goering answered:

Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war, either in Russia or in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…That is easy. All you have to tell them is that they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.{37}

George Kennan, American diplomat, historian and expert on Soviet policies, expressed a similar idea long ago:

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.{38}

British political commentator Andrew Marr expressed in 1993 what few in Europe dared to say in public, namely that “fear holds the key to the future of NATO.” This was actually the title of his article in the Independent (London). He wrote:

Military alliances are as keen as anyone to cloak themselves in happy-clappy idealism. But they are not kept together by that: they are cemented and underpinned by fear. NATO, whose foreign ministers met yesterday before its summit in January, is searching for a role in the language of democracy and fraternity. But what it really needs to thrive are more fear-soaked nightmares among its people.{39}

Author Webster G. Tarpley explains how a perceived external threat provides cohesion to societies, particularly those ruled by an oligarchy:

It is from [Carl] Schmitt that Samuel Huntington got his idea that an enemy image is absolutely necessary for the cohesion of any society. In reality, however, it is primarily an oligarchical society which requires an enemy image, because that society is based on an irrational principle of domination which cannot stand the scrutiny it would receive in peacetime. George Orwell understood this aspect well when he suggested in 1984 that the endless war among Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was really a war waged by each of these states against its own population, for the purpose of perpetuating a hierarchical society.{40}