I'm going to drag out some wreckage that we've looked at before, but bear with me. The 1984 movie Red Dawn depicted a Soviet invasion of America so cunningly executed that the Reds hardly needed to fire a single shot. The film relied on the premise that if we took our eyes off the Soviets for even a second they would overwhelm us. Much of the hysterical anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War relied on this (fairly ironic) assumption that communism was innately more efficient than capitalism, and that the West was clinging desperately to the losing side of history.

But in that strangest of strange years -- 1989 -- the Soviet Union disappeared so quickly that the rabid anti-communists among us refused to believe it was really happening. Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, suggested that it was all a trick; the fiendishly clever Russkies were simply trying to get us to lower our guard.

But the fearsome Russian bogeyman evaporated in spite of the Bush administration's best efforts, only to be replaced by the Japanese bogeyman. In Michael Crichton's 1992 novel "Rising Sun", the Japanese were so implacable and merciless that American businessmen didn't stand a chance against them in the boardroom. The message of that novel was: if we try to compete with them they will take everything we have. Not long after Crichton's novel was published, of course, the Japanese economy went into the tank, the Japanese government was embroiled into a series of scandals and crises, and suddenly the Japanese didn't seem ten feet tall and bulletproof anymore.

(Interestingly, the exact same message was subsequently found in another Crichton novel, Disclosure, although this time it applied to women : if we try to compete with them they will take everything we have.)

These days, the Chinese are the bogeyman du jour. Back in 1997, Richard Gere starred in a hysterical little movie called Red Corner, which depicted an American businessman battling a closed and inscrutable Chinese legal system that is, of course, stacked against him.

More recently, China's roaring economy is making Americans nervous. Manufactured goods bearing the stamp "Made In China" are more prevalent than the much-maligned "Made In Japan" stamp ever was. Most recently a Chinese company made a bid for the oil giant Unocal and the American government scrambled to block the sale. In the end, another oil giant -- Chevron -- gobbled up Unocal. But there was no way the cunning Chinese would be allowed access to Unocal's oilfields in Asia. It was clearly some kind of plot.

After all, the Chinese are cunning and rapacious.

And infallible. We all know they're infallible, right?