Your strategy of putting yourself in your "enemy's" head is exactly the right one. And like you say, you may make friends, which is even better.
But there are real enemies. Typically, faulty and pathological ideologies will breed them. Pathological ideologies usually class whole sections of society as a "disease." A dictatorship, with a pathological leader, is likely to try to enforce this pathology.
For example, Hitler wanted to exterminate whole swathes of people, simply for being themselves, or as he termed them, "animals."
Someone who thinks like that is an enemy, and you can't get round that.
Oh yes Rodney... won't disagree with that... there are evil people out there. But, they are aberrants... meaning truly evil people are not the norm.
Now, when we see a shark, we should know not to jump into the water. But, let's first identify the dorsal fin.