Maybe the answer is more obvious than I think, but I don’t know how to explain it.
It seems like since at least the 1990s (if not the late 1980s) the default antagonists in realistic, contemporary settings have not been governments or nation‐states, but foreign terrorists. You can find this trope in almost anything modernistic, from 24 to Bad Boys to Call of Duty sequels to the Diehard series to James Bond sequels to obscurities like Nuclear Strike to the Soldier of Fortune series to Syphon Filter to Lady‐only‐knows how many Tom Clancy books/films/games/shows/songs/baseball cards. Hardly anybody seems to find anything weird about this.
What is so fascinating about foreign terrorists?
Its a horrible mix of Orientalism and White Man’s Burden style thinking to reinforce the white supremacist capitalist overlord neoliberal Amerikkkan dictatorship.
The idea essentially “Those dirty brown peo-pull are resisting the U.S. Army raping their country’s people and natural resources for our corporate profits. They are in the wrong for defending themselves, so its okay to bomb the Global South. Whatever problems we have are either the fault or worse than those dirty savages have going on!”
Drives my piss to a boil.
Fast and Furious, for instance. It was originally about an undercover pig who decided to assist working class or lumpenproletariat drivers in resisting organized crime.
And now the latest movies show the main characters actively working for the CIA and Interpol fascists.
Or like how in the video game series Mirror’s Edge, you play as a badass courier trying to rescue her sister from pigs. And then in Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, the Black Panther-like Black November resistance movement is portrayed as being selfish demagogues that are sociopathic and chaotic, and being almost as bad as the pigs and capitalists they resist.