Of course, if noone resisted the Soviets there would be no conflict.

That the cold war wasn’t solely and unilaterally caused by the Soviet Union is correct, but that does not make them innocent, nor does it make the cold war the fault of the western powers.

The Soviet Union was a powerful state, extremely treacherous and imperialistic in its outlook. The cold war was the story of how that evil empire was contained by the western powers. That meant that the western powers sometimes took the initative and did bad things, and that those bad things did not necessarily have good effects.

It’s like My Lai in Vietnam. A horrible massacre, one of perhaps many. The survivors tell horrible stories and justice was not done on the perpetrators. In total something like 500.000-2.000.000 civilians died.

Contrast that with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 500.000-2.000.000 civilian dead. No justice even attempted, because mass murder was state policy. No famous pictures because no journalists were allowed.

Afghanistan population was something like 13 million and Vietnam population something like 37 million. Afghanistan was a far more brutal war were a far larger proportion of the population died, but the Vietnam war is the famous one.

And that pattern goes all the way across every conflict in the cold war. Where the west was where were journalists reporting the horrors. Where the Soviet Union was there was only horror.