Jonah: Red Dawn has always had the right enemies, as Matt Rees and Robert Schlesinger pointed out in the Weekly Standard on the film’s 20th anniversary:

the story of Red Dawn is a story of the quest for freedom over totalitarian aggression–schlocky, but still powerful. And in the telling of this story, what emerges is history’s most fiercely anti-Communist movie (an admittedly small category). There was clearly something to like about a movie that Pravda panned at the time as “a monstrous anti-Soviet concoction” that “poisons the audience’s minds with the drug of anti-Communism.” And there would, of course, have been only one appropriate response to such Kremlin-inspired belligerence: “Wolverines of the world, UNITE!”