Seconding Hoi4 TNO. Next option would DEFCON. Cheap, neat strategy game.

I recently attempted to try out Heart’s of Iron TNO, after it’s most recent update. And if you can look past the eye burning UI, It’s got a fairly okay storyline with a firmly anti-fascist narrative. Although if you’re specifically looking to trash on the US, then for strategy games I could recommend Eugen system’s Wargame and Warno series. I remember playing one of them way back in the day, and it was pretty good. They released the latest entry this year, I haven’t played it but it seems to have good reviews.

Unfortunately there isn’t. The only decent one I know is the 2003 RTS Rise of Nations, which has a mode that allows you to play a very limited form of grand strategy set during the cold war (you play some cards, take a couple actions, then move your armies to enter into an RTS match with the military of another country)

I’ve been looking for years for the same kind of game, but it looks like nobody is interested in making it, or everyone thinks it’s too hard to implement. There’s a couple games that advertise themselves as Cold War simulators, but they usually only focus on a nuclear exchange, or they are really just a click-intensive RTS game happening on the world map (e.g. Supreme Ruler).

There’s an upcoming grand strategy game called Espiocracy, set to release sometime in 2025. I hope it’s the Cold War grand strategy we’ve been looking for.

Until then, HoI4 mods are all we get. The good news is you can mod them further if you wish. Changing words in events is not that hard. All you need to do is find the event in the english localization file and change the offending words. It’s just a bit time-consuming if you want to do a bunch of changes.