Like the vast majority Americans, you may have missed the release last month of Red Dawn, a remake of the 1984 film of the same name in which a bunch of teenagers led by Patrick Swayze fought off an invading Soviet army in Colorado. The new version stars a collection of C-list actors and cost $65 million to produce; so far it has made less than one-third of that back at the box office. Only 11 percent of people who’ve seen the movie gave it a favorable review on the review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes—compared with 53 percent for the original and 92 percent for the latest outing of that other Cold War holdover, James Bond.
Despite its less-than-blockbuster performance, Red Dawn turns out to be surprisingly trenchant —though probably not in the way the film’s creators intended. In particular, the movie makes a powerful case for why the U.S. should take a sledgehammer to its military budget.
The new version of Red Dawn, like the original, centers around a foreign invasion of the U.S. The country that manages to invade this time is North Korea, a pariah state with a military budget generously estimated at $9 billion, compared with about $650 billion for the U.S. The North Korean economy is so battered that famines are a regular occurrence. This inadvertently lends the movie’s plot a smidgen of plausibility, since any North Korean invasion of the U.S. probably could be defeated by a misfit band of teenage dropouts.
Red Dawn was originally going to star the Chinese as the bad guys, which would have made a little more sense but also doomed sales prospects in a growing export market for Hollywood. Yet even China currently has but one aircraft carrier, which doesn’t have any aircraft stationed on it. It’s a third-hand boat, a hand-me-down from the Soviet Union to the Ukraine, which China picked up at a yard sale in 1998. Meanwhile, the U.S. has 20 carriers—all of which come with actual planes.
In fact, the relative success of movies like Independence Day and the Men in Black franchise suggest it’s far easier to imagine enemy forces arriving from outer space than it is from Russia, Japan, China, or (especially) North Korea. And that says something quite comforting about the state of American security.
As Tufts professor Michael Beckley points out, the U.S. now “formally guarantees the security of more than 50 countries,” which means the U.S. has more allies in the world than at any time in its history. More broadly, war between nation states has been incredibly rare since 1945. Europe is the most obvious beneficiary of Pax Americana: Before today, the last time the Rhine had gone this long without being crossed by armies with hostile intent was more than 2,000 years ago, according to economic historian Brad DeLong. The painful and often violent process of building independent nation states out of colonies was often stoked into civil war by the competing powers of the Cold War. But with the decline of that global struggle, and the growing legitimacy of the new countries, even civil wars are on the wane.