When I was a kid there was a competition with Russiaa that was front and center with Russia being seen as being ahead in space technology yet we never played astronaut. There were variations of war games or master and slave. Some kids feared Russian invasion and would think of good hiding places. Well we won that ideological arguement when we landed on the moon first, showing a democracy could deliver better than an autocracy. Making that assumption was really just propoganda. With Russia you never knew if it would be led by Ivan the terrible or Peter the great, Stalin or Gorbochev.
Now the US has shown that we too are prone to the authoritarian threat.

Politics really effects kids games. I have seen youth soccer teams that were just white kids chant USAUSA when the other team had more hispanic kids.