I came across this quote in the review of a biography of Gore Vidal that was published in the latest issue of The Economist:
Vidal’s sympathy for Timothy McVeigh, responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, may be hard to accept, but far fewer eyebrows will today be raised by his opposition to the Vietnam war (hence the clashes with Buckley), his scorn for Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush, his hostility to American policy in the Middle East, or even his view that America is an empire always in search of an enemy (following the demise of the Soviet Union, “one billion Muslims and the Arabs in particular” would, he said, “make a fine new evil empire to oppose”).
I am not concerned here with whether or not one should share such views but with the internal consistency of one of its elements. Did Vidal offer any arguments as to why an empire would always be in search of an enemy? Why would it have to do that (again, according to Vidal)?