So what message would the average fourteen-year-old take away from Black Ops Cold War? To riff on a phrase coined by Mark Fisher, the game evinces an “imperialist realism” that can’t quite justify American actions abroad, but also can’t imagine a world outside of a militarily dominant U.S. empire. This idea is clearly expressed in Bell’s trigger phrase (“We’ve got a job to do”), which implicitly affirms that in the Cold War, and perhaps in every war, all a soldier can do is put his or her head down and get to work. Though nothing — not the CIA, not the Soviet Union, not even one’s own mind — can be trusted, no other world is possible, so you might as well support your own empire.
After finishing Black Ops Cold War, our hypothetical young American will have learned very little about the actual Cold War itself. Historians have spent decades underlining the importance of ideology to the battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, but the game’s players never learn what, exactly, the two sides are fighting over; the words “capitalism” and “communism” are barely uttered. Instead, the game presents geopolitics as being about nothing but power, accepting the rather blinkered vision of so-called “realists” who reduce international relations to a struggle of might. This perspective is not just wrong — ideas, as innumerable scholars have demonstrated, inform how countries act in the world — but it also teaches young people that the only thing that matters in global politics is strength, and that they therefore must support the grotesque structures of the American empire: the 750 overseas bases, the enormous defense budget, the hundreds of thousands of troops stationed abroad. After all, the game argues, if they don’t, some other antagonist will arise to defy, and ultimately overtake, the United States.
Black Ops Cold War thus embraces an incredibly pessimistic theory of human nature, one in which people don’t fight over ideas, or even interests, but because fighting is what people do. While on its surface, Black Ops Cold War appears to offer a critique of U.S. foreign policy, the game’s profound cynicism ensures that it can’t offer a positive program, a way out of the present stagnation. It ultimately presents conflict as a necessary feature of American, and international, life, subtly endorsing the status quo position of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, which for almost a hundred years has claimed that the only way to keep the United States safe is to build a world-spanning empire that prevents other nations from becoming too powerful. The game takes a look at the Cold War, throws up its proverbial hands, and insists that it couldn’t have gone any other way. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson: Black Ops Cold War finds it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of American imperialism.