Vice President Richard M. Nixon boasted about American color television to Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, during their famous “kitchen debate” of July 1959, but the early Cold War was fought in black and white. The issues were monochrome and so were the images: stacks of Marshall Plan flour on an Italian wharf, C-47s approaching Tempelhof airport over the ruins of Berlin during the blockade, films of blast furnaces with white sparks emitted against a night sky, and the photos of the American vice president and the Soviet first secretary debating the path to household affluence in a Moscow exposition hall. At stake in that model American kitchen was consumer affluence or collective prowess, suburban dreams of the Eisenhower years versus Khrushchev’s cocky promise from 1956, “We will bury you,” rendered plausible a year later by the trail of Sputnik in the night sky.

Still, when Nixon and Khrushchev debated their societies’ respective achievements, they agreed that peaceful competition was preferable to ruthless military or political confrontation. Peaceful competition meant primarily economic competition: the rivalry between capitalism and state socialism. Divergent economic systems should not be so menacing that they compelled a strategic arms race; the two sides had not organized extensive alliances just to defend private or state ownership of capital, the market or the plan. Nonetheless, distinctions between socialism and capitalism seemed fundamental to ideological identity and to bloc cohesion in the 1950s, as they would again in the 1980s when the state socialist economies showed evident signs of decomposition. Neither were the distinctions just a source of ideological identity, no more than the stake of economic rivalry was just household appliances. The two economic systems had to provide the resources to sustain the military confrontation and subsidize allies. National power depended on economic achievement — a point the American vice president recognized when he conceded that the Soviets still led in getting payloads into orbit.