Was the Cold War more about differences in domestic and imperial governing structures and values or the starker realities between Russia's and America's relative power and interests?
The Cold War was, in my opinion, more about Soviet and American interests and their attempt to vie for power abroad. While the US was a capitalist democracy and the Soviet Union was ruled as a communist dictatorship, the two superpowers were similar in many respects as imperial powers. Both the US and the Soviet Union installed regimes in other nations that were friendly to them and their interests (an example is Diem in South Vietnam, whom the US supported).
The Cold War was a proxy war by which the Americans and the Soviets vied to control as much of the world as possible. Both nations were eager to control other nations to gain access to their markets and to keep them open for trade. After the Soviets took over much of Eastern Europe in the waning days of World War II, for example, the United States was determined to keep the rest of Europe open for trade. While cloaking their desires with the mantle of containing communism, the US was eager to keep European countries as economic and military allies. To this end, the US spent a great deal of money through the Marshall Plan to restore Europeans' shattered nations after World War II and to rebuild them along capitalist lines. Both the communist agenda of the Soviet Union and the capitalist agenda of the US relied on keeping other nations open for trade, and the Cold War was very much about these international economic interests rather than about domestic differences.
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