Having recently come out of the "puhblik educashun sistim", I am pretty sure that there is little hope for the American people to understand what is going on.
I was good and took my advanced European, American, Government, and Economics courses. Most of the school stuck with the basic classes where one cut and paste things together and wrote essays on how they "felt" about a country.
Too few graduates can not find Russia on a map, let alone tell you what the Cold War was.
Some of our maps even still showed the USSR as being in existence. It has been what, almost 19 years?
(Though I must say that those old maps may be right in the near future.)