The gameplay holds up and the lighting/shadowing is still impressive, but when it comes to plot wtf kinda bush era shit is this game on?
So Japan straight up violates the post-WWII agreements and remilitarizes. China and DPRK, as a reasonable act of self defense, block Japan off from the yellow sea. Your mission? Help....Japan? wtf?
That's just the intro. The first mission is literally "oh by the way, there's revolutionaries in Peru. Kill them". You go to them to get a hacker they captured because that hacker is the only one who can deal with a certain computer virus. He's the only one who can deal with it because you killed the virus creator in the first game. The game literally has blowback in the first mission lol. You literally grab and interrogate the revolutionaries for information and they even say shit like "you americans think you can just come here and decide our leaders for us" before you snuff them out. Then the next level is killing the revolutionary leader, who is bad because he's a revolutionary. And then hey the computer virus goes out anyway cause you the CIA ultimately suck ass. China and DPRK use the computer virus literally only against Japan, again, an act of self defense. Pretty sure the rest of the game is Sam Fisher running around mismanaging the crisis through the barrel of a gun.
All this stuff just went over my head as a teen but man, its comes across as so bizarre and fash now.
Basically yes, you are filling the role of the American international influence. In that sense you are the bad guy, it is a Tom Clancy game.
The story is actually a little more complicated, and more about preserving the "status quo". China if I recall correctly doesn't play much role in the story but DPRK is massively involved, but not in the way you expect.
spoiler
DPRK does NOT use this computer virus against Japan... Japan uses the virus against Japan. The main villain of the game uses this computer program to make it look like DPRK attacks an American warship and later launches a nuke at Japan. Part of the games story is actually finding out that the North Koreans are in fact innocent and have been scrambling to try to figure out how someone launched a missile through an information warfare attack. The motive actually is a Japanese admiral that wants to throw international relations into chaos in hopes of Japan and America repealing the post-war constitution so the Japanese Empire can rise again. This admiral also coordinates with one of Sam's friends who runs an American PMC. His friend's motive is that he thinks America is dying and this will refresh Americas position in the world. Again this reflects back to the games title. Sam ultimately succeeds in stopping the crisis and preventing what likely would have been WWIII by gathering the evidence and eliminating the ringleaders. The story is less about making the DPRK look bad and more about America preventing another fash country from competing with it.