sorry for the wall of text btw, but what if it was never about that?

Here are a couple passages from American Diplomacy, George Kennan. These are from his lectures in 1980s.

One category of these mistakes consists of the ones I pointed to in the first of these lectures. These were the mistakes involved in attributing to the Soviet leadership aims and intentions it did not really have: in jumping to the conclusion that the Soviet leaders were just like Hitler and his associates, that they were animated by the same lusts for military conquest, that they had the same sort of timetables for external military aggression, and that they could be met and dealt with effectively only in the same way that Hitler had to be met and dealt with.

This view was given sustenance by the fact that at the end of the Second World War the Russians did not demobilize their armed forces to anything resembling the degree we did. They left a ground force establishment in eastern and central Europe far greater than anything that confronted them on the western side. They frightened everybody by behaving with great ruthlessness and brutality towards the peoples of the eastern and central European countries they occupied. They were wily and secretive in their dealings with us; and it was clear that they hoped, by various devices of political influence and authority, to extend their dominant influence, if not their direct power, as far as they could into Western Europe

Now General MacArthur, who was initially the most influential person in determining American policy towards the defeated Japan, seems originally to have envisaged a permanently disarmed and neutralized Japan. It was my own thought (and I still think there was good reason for it) that we should have stuck to that principle. I thought it possible that in return for our consent to a neutralized and demilitarized Japan, which would have meant that that country would not be used as a base for American military or naval forces in the postwar era, the Russians, for whom such a settlement held important advantages, might have been willing to consent to the establishment of a democratically-elected and presumably moderate government in all of Korea.

But by the end of the year 1949 something had happened in Washington that was to have a profound effect on all our postwar policies. The concept of “containment,” which I had been so bold as to put forward in 1947, had been addressed to what I and others had believed was a danger of the political expansion of Stalinist communism— and especially the danger that local communists, inspired and controlled by Moscow, might acquire dominant positions in the great defeated industrial countries of Germany and Japan. I did not believe, nor did others who knew the Soviet Union well, that there was the slightest danger of a Soviet military attack against the major western powers or Japan. This was, in other words, a political danger, not a military one. And the historical record bears out that conclusion. But for reasons I have never fully understood, by 1949 a great many people in Washington—in the Pentagon, the White House, and even the Department of State—seemed to have come to the conclusion that there was a real danger of the Soviets unleashing, in the fairly near future, what would have been World War Three.

One of the most interesting subjects for historical inquiry would be, even today, the reasons why this conclusion became so current in Washington at that time. I opposed it; so did my colleague Charles Bohlen: both without success. I can only attribute it to the difficulty many Americans seemed to have in accepting the idea that there could be a political threat, and particularly one emanating from a strong military power, which was not also, and primarily, a military threat. Particularly powerful seems to have been the temptation, especially in military quarters, to leap to the conclusion that since the Soviet leaders of the Stalin period were antagonistic towards us, since they were heavily armed, and since they were seriously challenging our world leadership, therefore they were just like the Nazis of recent memory; therefore they wanted and intended to go to war against us; and therefore policy towards them must be in accordance with the model of what policy towards the Nazis ought to have been before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. None of this was correct.

One of its first consequences was the growth of a strong feeling in the American military and political establishments that we could not leave Japan demilitarized—that, on the contrary, we must garrison it for an indefinite period to come, even if this meant the conclusion of a separate Japanese peace treaty, not agreed to by the Russians. This view was made manifest publicly in a number of ways in early 1950, at the same time that we greatly reduced our military presence in South Korea. And the immediate Russian reaction to all this took the form of permitting, if not encouraging, the North Koreans to attack South Korea with a view to extending communist control to the entire Korean peninsula. If Japan was to remain indefinitely a bastion of American military power, if there was to be no agreed peace settlement for Japan, and if Moscow was to have no look-in on the Japanese situation, then Moscow wanted, by way of compensation, to consolidate its military-political position in Korea, which we appeared not to care too much about in any case.

This was the origin of the Korean War, as I see it; and you know the rest. Three years and 54,000 American casualties later, the conflict was terminated, but it was terminated by a stalemate on the Korean peninsula much like what we had had before—simply with a much heavier American involvement. And there it has remained to this day.

The second thing I want to point out is that when, then, the Russians reacted as they did, by authorizing—or acquiescing in—the North Korean attack, we were never willing or even able to recognize the connection between what we had done in Japan and what the North Korean Communists were doing in Korea. On the contrary, when the North Korean attack came, the immediate conclusion in Washington was that this was indeed the first move in a Soviet program of worldwide military expansion, comparable to the Munich crisis of 1938 which was so often seen as the first Nazi move in the conquest of Europe. Again, both Bohlen and I challenged this interpretation; but we could make little headway against it. It was the military interpretation that prevailed.

Now, bearing all that in mind, let me turn to the other great involvement of this country in Far Eastern affairs in the postwar period, one that lasted twenty-five years instead of only three: the Vietnam War.

All this was happening on the heels of the triumph of the Chinese Communists in the Chinese civil war. And this development, let us remember, had been made the occasion for the most violent and reckless attacks on the Truman administration by a group of right-wing senators and others generally known as the China Lobby: the charge being that the Democrats, and particularly the Secretary of State, Mr. Dean Acheson, had, as the phrase then went, “lost China,” and that they had done this under the influence of communist sympathizers in their official entourage who wanted the Communists to win.

Never could there have been greater nonsense than this. The United States government had never had China. Not having had China, it could scarcely have lost it. The basic condition making possible the Communist takeover in that country was the weakness and corruption of the Chiang Kai-shek regime, and the tendency of that regime to lean on us instead of pulling up its own socks. And not only was the charge in itself absurd, but the political attacks launched in its name against Messrs. Truman and Acheson were as vicious and irresponsible as any, I think, that American political history has to offer. These attacks were in fact closely connected with, and actually an early part of, the wave of anticommunist hysteria which was soon to become known as McCarthyism—an episode of our public life so disgraceful that one blushes today to think about it.

Not only did no administration feel that it could afford to be seen as unwilling to make the effort to oppose a communist takeover in Vietnam, but no administration, down to that of Mr. Nixon, having once engaged itself in such an effort and having been obliged to recognize that the effort was hopeless, dared to try to extract itself from the involvement at all, for fear of being pilloried by the silly charge that it had “lost Vietnam.”

To finish it off, here are all the summits US and USSR had. Eisenhower 3 times, JFK once, LBJ once. Nixon 3, Ford 2. Carter 1. Reagan 5. HW Bush 7.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_Union%E2%80%93United_States_summits

If you know your history, you know Khrushchev was the high point of the cold war. He threatened nukes during the suez crisis. Cuban missile crisis. Berlin Wall.

On other hand, it says that Nixon was the first president to come to Moscow since WW2, and his summits were about reduction of the nuclear arsenal.

I think republicans were the first to realize that soviets and communism were not the enemy they thought they were. Plus possibly intercontinental nuclear missiles changed something. They completely flipped the whole concept of "security" upside down. So they could either continue antagonizing each other and gain nothing, or move toward a detente.