I suspect part of Putin’s calculus on invading had to do with whether he’d get much response from the West. After all, he grabbed parts of Ukraine in 2014 and the response was… stern words.

Agreed on Bretton Woods, also on it being the wrong thing now — but the US was stuck with it when the USSR collapsed the first time as it was dependent on Persian Gulf energy supplies (no longer true, BTW). And then, as you mention, we got completely distracted by 9/11 — and the moment to steer the remnants of the USSR into something a bit more democratic had passed.

Even if the US had not been distracted, it has a terrible record on nation building, excepting the Marshall plan. Note that that plan relied on local leaders to decide how to use the aid. Was Russia changed enough that a decent leader like Gorbachev might have been able to use Marshall-plan-like funds to bring Russia into something like Swedish socialism? Or was there so much of the security apparatus left making that impossible? I wish we’d had a chance to try — but I also think it would have failed.

Also, I agree that Nixon’s (IMO Kissinger’s) bringing China into Bretton Woods was probably going to be an issue. As I read it, the intention was to break the Sov/China alliance. It worked. There was no way to know that China would end up using MFN to effectively ‘dump’ in the US. It was clear this was going on at least ten years ago — but cheap Chinese labor (and exporting our pollution) meant that the post-WWII ‘long boom’ could continue, and there was no political will to stop. The 1% kept getting richer and who wants to piss their donors off?

The Cold War is a remarkably interesting period. I find it both overwhelming (so much information — hey, I started with Herodotus) and fascinating.