Any government that is a national-security state needs big official enemies — scary ones, ones that will cause the citizenry to continue supporting not only the continued existence of a national-security state form of government but also ever-growing budgets for it and its army of voracious “defense” contractors.
U.S. also helping "transition" former Soviet bioweapons labs that "developed a broad range of biological pathogens for use as weapons against plants, animals, and humans, including the weaponization of anthrax, plague, and smallpox."
Living near an unincorporated community of Northwest Arkansas, I sometimes joke that our would-be town is made up of maybe 40,000 or 60,000, maybe more.