  As Schmitt would later point out in Theory of the Partisan, the distinction between absolute and contained enmity gives rise to a distinction between absolute, real, and conventional enemies (TP 85–95; see also CP 36–7; Slomp 2009, 112–26). A conventional enemy is an enemy within an established system of containment, whereas a real enemy is an enemy that can be made, though perhaps only after conflict, to settle for a territorial division. Absolute enmity, by contrast, exists wherever there is a conflict that is not amenable to territorial settlement. In Schmitt’s view, it is the powers who, for ideological reasons, refuse to accept a spatialization of conflict that are to blame for absolute enmity and the unbridled violence it entails. Those who are real enemies, but who need not be each other’s absolute enemies, then, have to find a way to recognize each other, to divide the world among themselves, and to hold down political forces that must reject the territorialization of political conflict. Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth, accordingly, portrayed the mutually recognized appropriation of the globe by mutually non-intervening, territorially-based political communities as the true foundation of all legitimate international (and thus of national) legal order (NE 42–9, 67–83; GO 77–9; see also Herrero 2015, 21–49). During the Nazi-period, Schmitt applied this view to a justification of Nazi-aggression, by portraying Nazi-Germany as a local hegemon willing to support a global territorial division based on a principle of non-intervention. Schmitt hoped, for a while at least, that America would reveal itself to be Germany’s ‘real enemy’ and that it would be willing to engage in a mutual division of spheres of influence. In this vein, Schmitt interpreted the Monroe-doctrine as the first act of hegemonic appropriation of a sphere of interest that might come to form part of a new global order, if only America were willing let Germany impose its own Monroe-doctrine on continental Europe (GO 83–90). For as long as they were militarily successful, Schmitt celebrated the Nazi wars as the birth pangs of a new ‘nomos of the earth.’ (LS section 20)