Reply #32: By this logic...

[StarfarerBill]

...the Soviet Union should have won the Cold War, since it lost tens of millions of civilians and soldiers as well as shouldering the burden of an entire front of World War II almost entirely alone. (As an aside, please note that I said our "national industrial capacity" was unscathed; of course we suffered terrible losses of life, but no attacks on our military-industrial complex...including the atomic weapon-production facilities, which came in very handy for strongarm diplomacy later.)

Quite simply, there would have been little or no aid to post-war Europe or anywhere else in the world during the Cold War years, had it not been for Soviet influence in those regions...just as the USSR would have been quite happy to sit back and do nothing had we not attempted to sell the American Way to others. The Cold War was, for the superpowers, primarily an ideological one.