The Hidden Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy in ‘Red Dawn’ (2024)

A high school class lecture on the Mongol Empire is suddenly interrupted by a paratrooper assault. The Russian-speaking paratroopers shoot first. The teacher is killed. Students scatter. An RPG blows up the school bus. Amid the chaos, a group of boys, in their letterman jackets and baseball caps, manage to clamber into the back of an older brother’s pickup truck. As they escape through familiar American streets suddenly turned into a war zone, one of them sees his dad. “Papa!” the student cries out in Spanish as his father is swarmed by enemy soldiers.

So goes the opening scene of the infamous 1984 film Red Dawn, released 40 years ago this August. The film shows us a world in which the Cold War has turned hot and the United States is invaded by the Soviet Union and its Latin American allies. The plot is straightforward: The group of high school students who escape the invasion begin a guerrilla resistance against the communist occupation of their small Colorado town. They adopt as their name their high school mascot: the Wolverines. They yell it as they ambush Soviet columns; they spray-paint it onto the sides of destroyed Soviet vehicles. “Wolverines!” lives on in popular culture as the ultimate war cry of an American resistance.

For many liberal, or simply sober, viewers, Red Dawn’s entire premise is ridiculous—a cinematic manifestation of Cold War nightmares and right-wing fantasies. The New York Times review of the film at the time called it “rabidly inflammatory,” “rip-roaring,” and “alarming.” For more conservative viewers, it quickly became a cult classic. Red Dawn was welcomed by many as an antidote to political correctness and flag-bashing, a patriotic romp perfect for the Reagan era. President Ronald Reagan himself is said to have seen and enjoyed the film. The National Review even includes Red Dawn in its list of the best conservative movies.

A straight reading of the film’s text would certainly support these conclusions. But the film’s real trick is that it is not so much a conservative movie as a cinematic tribute to insurgencies and guerrilla warfare, just made digestible for American audiences. Much like Rambo and Star Wars, what Red Dawn accomplished was basically to allow an American public that was still putting Vietnam behind them to reimagine themselves as the Viet Cong. Red Dawn was a chance for a nuclear superpower on the verge of global hegemony to still cast itself as a Rebel Alliance facing down the Evil Empire—to imagine themselves as still the Minutemen and not the Redcoats. In this way, Red Dawn scratches a deep ideological, even psychological, itch in American life to feel innocent.

Some, notably the historian Greg Grandin, argue that this myth of innocence is a central factor in the United States’ imperial projects, from Manifest Destiny through to the global war on terrorism. Red Dawn certainly contains within it the ideological seed of real-life atrocities, such as those committed by U.S.-backed dictatorships in Central America, all meant to forestall the prospect of a communist region depicted so menacingly in the film. A United States that can imagine itself being invaded by the Soviets via Latin America is a United States that can justify its own often brutal pursuit of hegemony in Latin America as a preemptive defense.

Yet neither the adulation on the right nor a critical analysis by the left truly does Red Dawn justice or comprehend its core message: that those under occupation have the right to fight back. This can be an uncomfortable message for Americans to swallow. Forty years after the film’s release, it has proved to be the Americans who went around the world as invading armies faced at times by teenagers who took arms in defense of their homes. Many don’t hear or understand the question, but Red Dawn continues to ask Americans: How would you like it if somebody did that to you?

Red Dawn is a time capsule of late Cold War anxieties. In the film, it is Europe that abandons its U.S. allies when faced with Russian aggression, not the other way around as many fear today. Instead, the strongest U.S. ally in World War III is none other than China, a proposition that sounds strange today but made perfect sense in 1984.

Much more directly relevant to today is the film’s treatment of Latin America. The opening titles tell us that Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico have all gone communist, paving the way for an invasion of the United States. In another scene, one character informs the others that the invasion began with a campaign of sabotage by Cuban infiltrators who “came up illegal”—a fantasy scenario straight out of a Trump campaign ad. The anxieties about the spread of communism in Latin America that Red Dawn expresses would see the U.S. support real-life covert wars, dictatorships, and atrocities in Central America, the legacies of which continue to drive migration to the United States to this day.

Yet the film also points to unexpected silver linings to these Cold War anxieties, such as when Ronald Reagan explicitly framed his pro-immigration politics as a way to counter communist influence in Mexico. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that the anxieties about a communist Mexico that Red Dawn articulates helped result in the 1986 immigration amnesty that millions of Latin Americans owe their U.S. citizenship to. Red Dawn shares this pro-Latino frame, depicting Latinos as an integral part of the small Colorado town that the communist armies invade. Notably the character of Arturo Mondragon (nicknamed “Aardvark” by his fellow Wolverines) is shown to be a brave and committed Wolverine, whose identity and bilingualism are an asset to his country’s cause.

Red Dawn also reserves its greatest sympathy among the communist invaders for the Latin Americans. While the Russian leaders are depicted as grim and cruel totalitarians, the Cuban colonel alone is depicted as thoughtful. There is just a hint of the Western admiration for Che Guevara and the romantic figure of the bearded guerrilla in the character of the Cuban colonel, who like Che is named Ernesto. He expressly prefers being on the side of the guerrilla. Perhaps he recognizes in these American kids the faces of the Angolan, Vietnamese, and Central American freedom fighters he mentions having fought alongside. Ultimately, he concludes he has no business occupying someone else’s country. In the end, he even lets the key Wolverine leader escape, saying, “Vaya con Dios” (“Go with God”).

The reflections of the Cuban colonel get at the heart of what Red Dawn really is: a profoundly anti-war and anti-imperialist film. When recommending it to friends, I personally describe it as The Battle of Algiers set in the American West. The Wolverines stand in for any teenagers from any land who have taken up arms against a foreign invader, from the Ukrainian partisans of World War II to the Palestinian kids throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. Tellingly, the Wolverines never attempt to write a political manifesto. They don’t laud free markets or even free speech. In fact, as close as they get to justification is when, on the verge of executing a Soviet prisoner and one of their own revealed to have betrayed them, two Wolverines argue about the morality of their cause. “Tell me, what’s the difference between us and them?” one Wolverine played by Charlie Sheen asks. The Wolverine leader, played by Patrick Swayze, bellows back: “Because we live here!”

The communist occupation in Red Dawn is depicted as nothing but violence, manifesting mostly as mass executions and internment of civilians, with the only ideological expression being red flags and the blaring of “The Internationale” as Soviet troops march down Main Street. What a real effort to win over the local population—or to build a communist Colorado—would look like is never shown. Ernesto, the Cuban colonel, advocates explicitly to win “hearts and minds,” citing the strategy of “our opponents … in Vietnam,” but the Soviet officer flatly notes that the Americans lost in Vietnam and advocates instead for the tactics of the Soviets in Afghanistan.

But unlike in 1984, a modern viewer would know the Soviets lost in Afghanistan, too. The Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan is foreshadowed in the film, which depicts the Russians’ massacres of civilians provoking the Wolverine resistance in the first place. The guerrillas on horseback fighting Soviet helicopters in the desert evokes the classic Western but also clearly evokes the mujahideen. The Soviets in the film do eventually recognize the role their repression plays in fueling the insurgency, with the new and more formidable Spetsnaz commander ending the policy of civilian reprisals shortly before the Wolverines’ final suicidal attack.

Indeed, the most difficult element of the film to reconcile with its pro-insurgent ideology is that the Wolverines basically lose. Unlike most real insurgencies, the Wolverine rebellion does not grow. Instead, the combatants fall by the wayside one by one (this occurring despite a scene showing the Wolverines freeing and arming American internees, who would have presumably joined the insurgency). The film ends with the two leaders conducting what amounts to a suicide raid on the occupation headquarters in town. The last two Wolverines make their way to free America, effectively abandoning their guerrilla war. It’s a strangely grim conclusion to what, in the first half of the movie, had promised to be a triumphant Cold War fantasy of American high schoolers defeating the Red Army. Instead, we are left with two traumatized teenage survivors and a war with no end in sight.

Only the film’s final voiceover offers reassurance that the Americans actually win World War III. We are told the film’s action took place “in the early days of World War III,” as the camera shows us the Wolverines’ “partisan rock” now turned into a war memorial with a U.S. flag flying. Presumably, the territory of Colorado has been liberated from the Soviets, although how the United States eventually managed to achieve victory despite having massive swaths of its homeland under foreign occupation is beyond the film’s scope.

While it met with mixed reviews from critics, audiences generally liked Red Dawn, which was a success at the box office. As absurd as the premise is, Red Dawn’s appeal is easy to understand. It’s basically a Western, that most familiar of American genres. The Wolverines ride horses, survive in the wilderness, and drink deer blood like Daniel Boone. The Soviets for their part give a hilariously Marxist version of the American Indian Wars. But the basic thrill of the film is seeing the so mundane and familiar turned into the setting for America’s great geopolitical struggle.

A few months after Red Dawn’s release, Reagan won a landslide reelection with the slogan “Morning in America.” The story of a patriotic small-town uprising that Red Dawn tells felt very aligned with the zeitgeist. Both Red Dawn and Reagan’s landslide can be seen as part of a broader regaining of U.S. confidence in the late Cold War. From the 1980 Miracle on Ice to the fall of the Berlin Wall, America was back, the Soviets were down, and the demons of the failed imperial war in Vietnam could be finally put to rest. The United States’ crushing victory in the 1991 Gulf War seemed to confirm it, with President George H.W. Bush declaring, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

Red Dawn was undeniably part of that cultural process of the United States regaining a belief in itself and its assertive role in the world—a deeply ironic fact for a film that celebrates small rural America and is clearly skeptical of war and imperial adventure. The irony perhaps peaked in 2003, when the U.S. military operation to capture Saddam Hussein during the invasion of Iraq was named Operation Red Dawn, with its objectives dubbed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2. The film’s director, John Milius, was pleased, calling the U.S. soldiers who captured Saddam the “Wolverines who have grown up and gone to Iraq.”

Yet there is an immense irony in Americans invoking Red Dawn as they invaded another country. Writer Timothy Noah, who supported the Iraq War at the time, criticized the name precisely for this irony: “The U.S. military isn’t mounting an insurgency against a foreign invader. It is the foreign invader. … In this particular situation, Huge Invading Force = Good Guys, and Scrappy Wolverine Resistance = Bad Guys.”

Only now, in the post-unipolar moment, has the true meaning of Red Dawn come back into view. Americans have largely come to the same realization as the Cuban colonel: Their country shouldn’t be trying to occupy foreign lands. Red Dawn takes this anti-war view even further, inviting Americans to sympathize with those who violently resist an occupation. It’s an uncomfortable message for a nation that is, at the time of this writing, actively supporting an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land even while supporting Ukrainian resistance to Russia. How many Palestinian and Ukrainian teenagers have taken up arms to fight the Israelis or the Russians because—like the Wolverines—they have been told by their fathers to avenge them? Are they that different from the all-American boys in Red Dawn, who go from concerned about the football game to gunning down Soviet columns? “Tell me, what’s the difference between us and them?”

In the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many believed that Kyiv would fall within days. Then, slowly but surely, reports of underdog Ukrainian victories started trickling out and adding up. Russian helicopters downed. Russian convoys stuck. Russian paratroopers defeated. And best of all: destroyed Russian tanks and armored vehicles, smoldering on a road somewhere near Kyiv. Someone had spray-painted “Wolverines” on the wreckage.

If nothing else, we know that someone in Ukraine has watched Red Dawn. The appeal for Ukrainians is obvious, the lesson straightforward: Fight the invaders. For Americans, Russians, Israelis, and many others, the lesson is this: For better or for worse, “Because we live here” is the only self-justification an insurgency has ever needed.