So let me get this straight:
There's a powerful nation coming towards Earth to wipe us all out before we get advanced enough to protect ourselves because they both want what we have and don't want to give us the opportunity to build up, and they also have people here among us who despise the current people in charge and think the foreign invaders will be better for us all.
Additionally even as we live under threat of oncoming invasion, people still want to believe "surely they're not as bad as we think they are; look how advanced they are!"
The only thing that also turns them away finally? We create a mutually assured destruction weapon, and this is what finally stop the invasion and makes the invader behave themselves; meanwhile, people here on Earth are actually really getting into the cultural works of the people who want to invade us; we listen to their music, read their philosophers, watch their movies, etc., and we believe that coexistence with the vastly more powerful foreign nation is entirely possible and things must absolutely be different now, surely.
Of course the most powerful, 'needs to be ready to push the button' person on the planet is now becoming more trusting of this former foe nation and thinks perhaps there really is middle ground between them and doesn't truly want to even be in the position where they'd have to fight back against them, and in that moment of indecisiveness, in that moment of weakness, the foe nation already had the means of our destruction at our doorstep, waiting for a weak 'leader', and starts the war to annihilate us.
Watching this it definitely felt like a dig at American soft power and how the only thing that stops us from invading places like the DPRK are deterrents or MAD weapons, and also how we like to build up treasonous groups who oppose their own countries thinking we're going to be in it for their sakes.
The problem with that reading comes in later books
basically the thesis of the series
Where every society is just like that as the default.Sequels are just inherently reactionary (no I will not elaborate)
For a lot of them, it's probably just that there are inherently interesting questions in society, and their plots are their best answers to that. Therefore, the result is liberals writing libslop.
At the same time, there are probably others that have an interesting pitch, with plans to write something radical, but are then stifled by liberal publishers and producers and so on. The result: 'we loved the pitch... but maybe we could take it in a different direction???'
These producers either won't tolerate your different viewpoint, or are frightened of the optics of publishing something like that because they don't want any controversy.
The core remains, the interesting hook remains, but the story gets weathered off by the end. Either the writer quits, capitulates, or gets in a fight and negotiates for all sorts of little details that might let people into what they really think. It's like Shakespeare with King James.
I'm very early in a writing career, and I've already had my work neutered and censored. I wasn't even working with a large company, and I wasn't saying anything that I thought was too controversial.