What sets the United States apart from the rest of the world is and has always been its soft power. The Soviets may have equaled the Americans in nuclear capability, but they could never rival the appeal of the “American way of life.” And even as China tries to spread its culture across the globe, its rise tends to inspire more trepidation than admiration.

Many ingredients combine to give U.S. soft power its strength and reach, but entertainment and culture have always been central to the mix. Film and television have shaped how the world sees the United States—and how it perceives the country’s adversaries. Yet that unique advantage seems to be slipping away. When it comes to some of the great questions of global power politics today, Hollywood has become remarkably timid. On some issues, it has gone silent altogether.

The most glaring example is the growing wariness of U.S. studios to do anything that might imperil their standing with the Chinese government. China’s box office is as large as the American one, and entertainment is above all a business. So Hollywood sanitizes or censors topics that Beijing doesn’t like. But the phenomenon is not limited to China, nor is it all about revenue. Studios, writers, and producers increasingly fear they will be hacked or harmed if they portray any foreign autocrats in a negative light, be it Russian President Vladimir Putin or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator took on Adolf Hitler. Later, Martin Scorsese’s Kundun shone a light on the fate of Tibet, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Hunt for Red October made the Cold War come alive. Today, the market power of China—and the cyberpower of some rogue states—is making studios and creatives think twice about producing such daring, overtly political films. And as the retreat from the kind of films that once bolstered American soft power accelerates, Hollywood is running out of real-life antagonists.

Nazi troops were marching into Poland when Chaplin began filming The Great Dictator. The film’s titular character, a buffoonish, mustachioed dictator named Adenoid Hynkel, was clearly meant to deflate Hitler’s magnetic appeal. The British government, seeking to appease Germany, initially suggested it might ban the film from British theaters. (It changed its mind once the war commenced.) Even among Chaplin’s collaborators in Hollywood, some feared a backlash. (Hollywood also had a financial interest in reaching the large German film market, although historians debate how much this led American studios to bend to Nazi preferences in the 1930s.) U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt is said to have personally encouraged Chaplin to continue production. When the film was released in 1940, it proved an artistic and political triumph and was among the highest-grossing films of the year. Soon, overt condemnations of fascism were the norm: between 1942 and 1945, over half of all Hollywood films touched on the war in some way or another, hundreds of them with an anti-Nazi message.

With the Cold War came a new adversary against which to deploy the promise and glamor of American consumerism. Hollywood was on the frontlines of this effort. American films from the early years of the Cold War often brimmed with anti-Soviet jingoism. (I Was a Communist for the FBI, released in 1951, is a classic of the genre.) Indeed, nearly half of all war-themed movies coming out of Hollywood in the 1950s were made with the Pentagon’s assistance and vetting to ensure they were sufficiently patriotic. (To this day, the Pentagon and the CIA have active entertainment liaisons.) Even foreign productions were enlisted in the culture war against the Soviets: in 1954, when British animators adapted Animal Farm, George Orwell’s famous allegorical indictment of Stalinism, they enjoyed secret CIA funding.

By the 1960s, Hollywood productions began to cast the United States and its role in the world in a far more critical light. But even if it was not their intended effect, these films projected American values and bolstered U.S. soft power in their own way: by demonstrating Americans’ openness and tolerance for dissent. Dr. Strangelove called out the absurdity of apocalyptic nuclear confrontation. Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and even the popular TV series M*A*S*H presented nuanced and sometimes harrowing perspectives on U.S. power abroad.

Fears of a cyberattack are not fiction. HBO, Netflix, and UTA, one of Hollywood’s largest talent agencies, have all suffered hacks in recent years; in the case of HBO, federal prosecutors eventually indicted a former Iranian military hacker. Devastating cyberattacks against other U.S. entities, such as the 2015 data breach at the federal Office of Personal Management, which U.S. officials linked to the Chinese government, have shown that no institution is immune from the threat. Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election further fueled the perception in liberal Hollywood that foreign hackers are skilled, ruthless, and essentially undeterrable.

As the line between technology and media continues to blur, CFIUS will probably heed Schumer’s call before long. (Indeed, CFIUS is currently engaged in a review of ByteDance, the Chinese parent firm of the massively popular video-based app TikTok.) But greater government scrutiny is unlikely to make studio executives more willing to run with content that might draw the ire of Beijing and threaten their profits. The result is an uneven competitive landscape that rewards those who play it safe. Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen will remain taboo subjects in Hollywood. The same deference shown to Beijing may be extended to countries that lack major box offices but whose regimes have shown themselves willing to attack their perceived opponents abroad, such as North Korea and Russia.

Not long ago, an Oscar-winning screenwriter was asked to rewrite one of the biggest video game franchises. The company began by saying that the war-based game had a problem: who was the enemy? It could not be China, of course. Nor Russia, North Korea, or Iran. As the company executives said, “We don’t know who we can make the villain anymore.”