system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
Lots of bad things happened during the Cold War. But the NATO alliance wasn’t one of them. And the NATO countries were not held together by McCarthyism. 

Indeed, there were many Stalinists in Western Europe, which is what prompted George Orwell, a socialist who opposed Stalin, to write *1984*. It was the Marshall Plan that initially held the alliance together, until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 turned Western Europe firmly against the U.S.S.R., much as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has turned Western Europe firmly against Russia.
gpt
Well the existence of an alliance such as NATO is obviously not a bad thing, and especially since Europe nearly destroyed itself a few years earlier, I think it was probably a very smart move. My issues are: A) the United States in particular absolutely was controlled top to bottom by a right-wing, McCarthyist red scare mentality, and; B) ensuring that the Soviets don’t nuke France is very different from overthrowing democratic governments in South America, Asia, etc, just because we wanted to assert our global hegemony.