Good frigging Lord, study some history.
It DOES go back further than sixty years, you know.
Tor thousands of years, human civilization has been largely comprised of highly successful aggressors. Many of the others simply vanished from history. That's not a moral judgment, but it is a fact.
We were DAMN lucky with the Soviets. We had to destroy Japan and Germany.
Neither of us is old enough to remember WWII, but there were times when the outcome was anything but certain. Not much would have needed to change to end up with Europe and most of Asia under tyranny.