Back in the day, the right in this country continuously banged the hysteria drum that our very existence was in serious peril because the Russians had promised to bury us. This paranoia seriously distorted our foreign policy and military spending. The catastrophe of Viet Nam was the direct result of this demagoguery. The truth was that Russian communism was always doomed to implode because a central control society is horrifically inefficient and we wasted our blood and treasure fighting a fantasy. By comparison, Putin's Russian is a pathetic shadow of the old Soviet Union. His economy is smaller and less diverse and weaker that Italy's. He is the mouse that roared.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare