the americans pretend the cold war was bipolar; a contest of two meaningful equals, since it makes them look better. in reality, it was a war of the filthy rich against the dirt-poor, at a time when wealth wins wars, as it has since the 1500s. broadly speaking, in 1945, there were six industrial megacomplexes in the entire world - my term for a large region containing what at the time were the foundational industries of economic development, namely blast furnaces for manufacturing large quantities of high quality-steel. these megacomplexes were a geoeconomic phenomenon that doesn't really exist any more, partially thanks to how much cheaper it is to ship things these days and how many different industries we have going into all the things we make. in the days before the rise of the computer and plastics industries, steel was the foundation of economic growth and production, and everything that mattered was downstream of steel. picture a scene in band of brothers and ask yourself - how much of what they're carrying is made of steel? steel helmets, steel gun-barrels, steel tank armour, etc. nowadays the helmets are kevlar and the tank armour is partially rubber, but at least the gun barrel is still steel. thanks to the tyranny of transport costs (no shipping container revolution), other vital heavy industries like machinery and weapons want to be as close as possible, so industries tend to agglomerate into these megacomplexes. one of these megacomplexes lay in the northeastern united states on the detroit-pennsylvania axis, one in central russia with twin centres of donbas and the urals, one based in the ruhr valley of western germany, one in the central and northern united kingdom, one in belgium and northern france, and one split between manchuria and southern japan. not a coincidence that all of these are built on large coal deposits. their fates were varied, of course; the ruhr and the bit of the last the japanese inherited became the cores of a very different kind of industrial megaregion, while the french-belgian industrial region and part of the america none managed to gracefully age into finance/services/tech. the manchurian half of the east asian megacomplex, along with the british and most of the american and soviet ones, became rustbelts.
back to 1945 - the belgian complex had been thoroughly looted by the nazis, and in any case was never what it was after its first destruction and looting in the first world war. of course, much of the russian complex was uprooted or destroyed, and the german complex bombed (but not nearly as much as it might have been as noted by multiple historians, although various other reasons are ascribed), and much of the japanese complex firebombed or looted. if you draw the lines of the cold war, you notice two things - firstly, that the free world has a 3:1 margin, ignoring damage. they also get the only undamaged complexes in the uk and us. the one-and-a-half complexes the communists end up with are also the youngest; japanese modernization started in the 1870s and the russian industrial complex only began to take shape in the 1880s; the (horrifically brutal) japanese development of manchuria didn't start until 1931.
think about what this means for the balance of power. the industries of 1945 were not those relevant in 1985, but they did confer wealth in 1945, and wealth allows for investment. the cold war was, in large part, an economic war, and the american economy was always far stronger than the soviet and chinese economies. we can look at stalin's reluctance to export the revolution in the 1950s or the willingess to embrace detente by both the soviets and chinese in the 1970s or even dengist retrenchment as betrayals of the revolution, or we can look at them as realistic acknowledgements of just how heavily the odds were stacked against them.
