Yeah. Nobody on the Left believes that America was the prime instigator of the Cold War.

It took me less than a minute to pull this one up. Another minute gave me this.

For Chomsky, the mainstream understanding of the Cold War has a particular ideological effect. The Soviet threat, and the US's need to contain it, was overstated during the Cold War to serve two primary purposes. First, the creation of the Cold War military-industrial complex provided a public justification for massive state interventionism in the US economy. Chomsky quotes John Lewis Gaddis, who argued that containment "has been the product, not so much of what the Russians have done, or of what has happened elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United States...What is surprising is the primacy that has been accorded economic considerations in shaping strategies of containment, to the exclusion of other considerations." This economic interventionism laid the foundations for post-war US economic growth and served US capital in so far as it provided massive levels of protectionism for crucial high-tech industries (for example, the capital intensive computing and automation industries). It also socialised private investment risks and guaranteed vast, state subsidised profits. Former US Deputy Under Secretary of Defence, Charles Duncan Jr., summarised the position clearly when he stated "Why, you may ask, do some have the view that the Soviet Union has become the world's number one military power? The answer is that, to a large extent, we have created that image ourselves...in the understandable desire to reverse the anti-defence mood and propensity for reduced defence budgets...". US military spending also stimulated the economies of key US allies deemed crucial for the post-war political economy. These allies included Western Europe through the US purchase of strategic raw materials from European colonies, Japan during the Korean War and South Korea during the Vietnam War.

Second, and more importantly for this paper, the Soviet threat served as a convenient pretext for justifying US military interventionism in the third world, which, according to the logic of North-South relations, was necessary to maintain access to raw materials and markets and ensure cheap labour, to maintain regimes favourable to US interests, and to stifle or overthrow movements considered inimical to US interests.28 Kennan summarised the private objectives of US policy clearly in 1948:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.... We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.