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I have more of a realist take on the cold war. I don't think that a good vs evil analogy is the best way to understand it. Despite their tough rhetoric, and sometimes brutal practices, I think that on a gut level the soviets were just as scared of war as we were, and that like us, they were acting in a primarily defensive mode.
So what about Vietnam? In broad strokes, I think the US was unable to see past the fact that Ho Chi Minh was a communist. The underlying truth was that he was a nationalist, and wanted to see a unified Vietnam, not a soviet whipping boy. Second, we were unwilling to resort to the total war measures necessary to win the war there. Public support for the war declined, and we pulled out. I suppose you might call it a victory for democracy.
We could have just pounded them into the stone age, but that would hardly have been a victory.
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