Containment worked. SEATO was part of containment. The Soviets would rule the world today without the success of containment. By hook or crook, the communists had to be stopped or at least significantly slowed down in SE Asia. I’m telling you 350,000 dead Americans was worth it to stop Nazism and the price paid for containment was worth it to destroy the Soviets and Comintern.
The Soviets never had the ability to rule the world, they could not even take care of their own people with basic necessities. They were already spending a huge amount of GDP on Defense as it was. All of that was Cold War Propaganda by the Deep State for a Continual State of Fear to have constant war which we have had since W.W. II. Pull back and do some research on this. That was as much Hysteria then as Covid 19 was today.
one of the main campaign issues in 1960 was the so called Missile Gap between us the Soviets with the implications they had more missiles. That was an outright lie and never was true but we bought it anyway. The Russians had way less missiles than we did but that issue made them spend even more money on Defense to catch up.