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Having played through the campaign of MW2 again I feel that in retrospect a lot of the critical attention that framed it in the context of American jingoism (however understandable) were actually a bit limited and missed the more disturbing implications of the game's narrative
CoD -- and plenty of other media franchises, Ubisoft's Clancyverse being the other big one in games -- isn't so much focused on the defence of American interests as it is on the idea of a world built upon ever-escalating, extraordinary violence committed by extraordinary actors
The framing of Western NATO-aligned interests vs. former Soviet entities across all the modern CoD titles is convenient, but I think the metaphor can be extended even more as the Cold War itself can serve as the ultimate metaphor for a more ancient, mythical narrative of violence
For all its efforts otherwise, ultimately at the end of the day CoD and its like are not concerned with war as it happens on the level of armies, and humans; but war as waged as myth, seen from the eyes of supersoldiers free from the expectations/limitations of normal soldiers
The whole selling point of MW -- from CoD4 to MW2019 -- is that there exists a cabal of operators in this world whose movements and actions fundamentally shift the tides of global violence but who cannot exist in the light as their violence exists beyond justifiable morality
The source of Makarov's villainy isn't specifically the extremity of his methods -- which are echoed in the actions of the SAS/CIA operators too-- but that he poses an existential threat to the idea of controlled perpetual warfare, and acts as a catalyst to the world state of MAD
As Shepherd himself heavily implies at the beginning of the game, it's not nations themselves that matter, but their ability to create heroes (which ironically is the very thing that spells his own demise): America just happens to offer the most potential as a military superpower
The most controversial scenes in CoD (No Russian, child soldiers, the house raids) exist not to interrogate the morality of warfare or our potential complicity in it, but as the ultimate evidence that these operators are fundamentally beyond us in every way, including morality
More and more these days we've witnessed the rise of a culture of valorisation of amoral "heroes" who were cultivated as sovereign agents in horrific secret programmes, who pass through traditional structures -- the Army, for example -- only to eventually serve private interests
Although American culture certainly exacerbates a lot of these traits through its foundational ideologies, I think that the problem is far more global in its reach and implications; and we've already begun to see the consequences of it in figures like Gallagher and Chris Kyle
We should be wary of a world in which our "heroes" are shadowy figures with redacted names and faces, who operate in small, highly mobile units using methods that fundamentally exploit legal/moral loopholes, who serve interests with names are unlisted from official documentation
