Why 1984’s Red Dawn Still Matters

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.

The logic of the domino theory took on particular urgency in the early 1980s, after the collapse of the corrupt and brutal Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua and the coming to power of a Marxist-Leninist government—the Sandinistas, who in turn supported leftist guerrillas in neighboring El Salvador. The Sandinistas were named in honor of Augusto César Sandino, leader of the rebellion against the 1927-1933 U.S. occupation of Nicaragua, and became the focus of President Ronald Reagan’s anticommunist ire.

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Reagan had never doubted the righteousness of the U.S. cause in Vietnam, and he rejected the notion that the U.S. should learn to live with its communist neighbors in Central America and the Caribbean. As his administration tightened the embargo against Cuba and supported the counterrevolutionary forces known as the “contras” battling the Sandinista government, the film Red Dawn encouraged the American movie-going public to empathize with the protagonists’ plight as insurgents battling a joint Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan occupation.

The premise of the dystopian world of Red Dawn took shape in this historical context. In the story line, the Soviet Union is suffering its worst wheat harvest in 55 years and the Red Army has invaded Poland to crush a nascent uprising. Cuban and Nicaraguan troop strength is up to half a million, and El Salvador and Honduras have fallen to communism, which has subsequently plunged Mexico into revolution. Meanwhile, in Europe, NATO has dissolved and the United States stands alone.

The movie opens in a classroom at Calumet High School, home of the Wolverines, where, against the backdrop of an idyllic Rocky Mountain community, incoming communist paratroopers unpack weapons crates and begin mowing down everyone and everything in sight. The general reaction of teachers and students is panic and bewilderment about who these invaders are and what exactly is happening.

A group of high school students escapes, retreating to the mountains and commencing sabotage operations against the communists.

Ironically, this mirrored the role of Castro and his fellow guerrillas who fought the forces of Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista from their hideaway in the Sierra Maestra mountain range. Led by Jed (played by Patrick Swayze), the Wolverines ultimately create so much havoc for the occupying forces that the Soviet commander explicitly compares the situation to Afghanistan, where at the time in real life the Soviets were fighting a brutal counterinsurgency against the U.S.-supported mujahideen.

Red Dawn can be seen as a pop cultural inoculation against the “Vietnam syndrome,” the legacy of self-doubt about the morality of U.S. foreign policy. The film’s plot effectively transformed the United States from the aggressor in its attempts to thwart the regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua into the victim of an utterly implausible military invasion and occupation by those very same regimes. One of the movie’s taglines—“No foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now.”—captured the ultimate endpoint of the domino theory.

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The original script for Red Dawn was titled “Ten Soldiers” and its message was anti-war. But the studio chose not to bring the writer into the project. The studio instead hired John Milius, a known political conservative, as its director.

The studio was likely hoping to cash in on and amplify the patriotic fervor that swept the nation during Reagan’s first term and especially in the aftermath of the 1983 U.S. overthrow of a Cuban-supported communist government on the small Caribbean island of Grenada. OPERATION URGENT FURY was a quick, decisive victory, and raised Washington’s hopes of further anticommunist victories in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Milius said that his version of the film was basically “a zombie movie with Russians,” and that “the message of Red Dawn is to liberate the oppressed.”

It is indeed a stunning achievement that during one of the most aggressive periods of US Cold War foreign policy, the film successfully portrayed the U.S. and the American people as the oppressed. In doing so, it helped argue to American audiences that U.S. Cold War foreign policy was fundamentally a defensive reaction to the relentless advance of the Soviet Union, which Reagan referred to as an “evil empire.”

Upon its release, the National Coalition on Television Violence condemned Red Dawn as the most violent movie ever made, with an average of 134 acts of violence depicted per hour.

And Red Dawn became an instant classic among the U.S. armed forces. Later, the 2003 mission to capture Saddam Hussein was codenamed OPERATION RED DAWN, with the target labeled WOLVERINE I. Army Captain Geoffrey McMurray, who chose the name, said “I think all of us in the military have seen Red Dawn.” The irony of naming a mission to capture a foreign leader after invading and occupying his country in honor of a movie that portrays the U.S. as a victim of the same scenario is overwhelming.

The stories Americans tell themselves about their country’s role in the world matter. Nowhere is this clearer than the morally fraught battles playing out between Russia and Ukraine and among Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian people today. The popular U.S. narrative of these conflicts is that Americans are aligned with the “good guys” in an existential struggle against the forces of evil.

The pursuit of “endless war” has characterized U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy; it is made possible only by the failure of the American public to grapple with the morally ambiguous origins and consequences of U.S. military interventions abroad. And cultural representations like Red Dawn have played a key role in obscuring that history.

Michelle D. Paranzino is associate professor of Strategy & Policy and director of the Latin America Studies Group at the U.S. Naval War College. The opinions expressed here are hers alone.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.