August 2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the classic Hollywood film Red Dawn. As the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to feed fears of a wider global conflict, the movie is worth revisiting for its depiction of the outbreak of World War III.
In portraying the U.S. as an innocent victim of an unprovoked communist invasion and occupation of North America, Red Dawn fundamentally inverted the historical reality of U.S. Cold War foreign policy, especially in Latin America. Even as that history was marked by U.S. efforts to overthrow Latin American governments, the movie told a story of Latin American aggression against the United States. The movie’s popularity, and its enduring appeal to many members of the U.S. armed forces, suggests that Americans are much more comfortable viewing themselves in the role of victims than aggressors.
Dating back to the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, U.S. foreign policy sought to prevent the intrusion of European imperialism in the Western hemisphere. During the Cold War, this meant that any Latin American government seeking normal diplomatic and trade relations with the Soviet Union was suspect.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro pursued an alliance with the Soviet Union, which many U.S. policymakers viewed as a fundamental betrayal of the Monroe Doctrine. As a result, one presidential administration after another unsuccessfully employed economic, political, and military means in the hopes of overthrowing the regime. The failed U.S.-supported covert Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and repeated assassination attempts on Castro convinced the Cubans and Soviets that Washington was bent on regime change. This led to the Cuban missile crisis, the most dangerous flashpoint of the entire Cold War that ultimately resulted in a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba.
The strategic logic of U.S. Cold War interventionism was premised on the “domino theory,” which held that if one nation fell to communism, those surrounding it would inevitably collapse, one by one, in a chain of dominoes ultimately spilling into the United States. The domino theory was used to justify the U.S. war in Vietnam, where the revelation of U.S. atrocities was so horrific that it created a domestic crisis of confidence—the “Vietnam syndrome”—about the moral righteousness of the U.S. role in the world.
