“The comment that we destroyed one eliminationist tyranny to assist another gain control of half of Europe is very disturbing to many Americans that have grown up on the good war and the only good war theology.”
Your absolutely right; Americans would rather live with the myth rather than the truth. Coming from an area with many Eastern Europeans (mostly Poles), the myth died a long time ago. The people that France & Britain went to war for (though only declaring war on Germany while the USSR invaded eastern Poland) ended up enslaved by Bolshevism instead of National Socialism; different groups simgled out for murder, but the same result just the same (on a much larger scale). When you tell Americans that the wars in Korea & Vietnam followed directly as a result of saving Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks, you get some strange looks; it is the truth.
I'd say those were the result of abandoning Chiang Kai-Shek. No Communist China - no Korean or Vietnam War.