The menace, said Truman, can only be combated by the US military, well funded with our tax dollars, and a huge CIA and a host of other spy agencies. Now these claims were implausible on a number of fronts. First, Russia was a main US ally the day before yesterday. Second, Russia was bankrupt after the war, and its people were all but starving. The Soviet military, despite massive US aid, was exhausted and thinned.
Socialism is the system of economics least likely to survive a war.
Third, it's true that Russia's influence over Europe was unprecedentedly huge and evil, but that was because FDR and Truman agreed to slice up the postwar map in exactly that way. If you wanted to wage a war against Communism, the best place to start was the Truman administration itself. Nonetheless, the Republicans were eventually browbeaten into signing up for a new military crusade, one which was to eventually cost trillions of tax dollars, sustain big government at home, put US troops in more than 100 countries, and utterly betray George Washington's vision of a country that engages in commerce with all and entangling alliances with none. Ironically, the US cold war state actually ended up forestalling economic and political reforms in Russia itself, causing communism to live far longer than it otherwise would have. My old intellectual mentor Neil McCaffrey, founder of Arlington House, the Conservative Book Club, and much of the conservative movement, had his world outlook shaped by the pre-war generation of conservatives who hated standing armies and understood that warfare generated welfare.