The U.S. has been an aggressive, expansionist power since its inception. That's what the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish American war, interventions in Haiti, etc. were all about. All this precedes the Russian revolution by many years. Even if there had been no Soviet Union, if the military intervention by the US, UK, France, etc. of 1918 had succeeded, there would have been anti-colonial and socialist movements all over the world, and the UK, US, etc. would have had their "hamfisted" interventions. Containment just means containment of popular struggles by backing corrupt, authoritarian regimes. To some extent the USSR aided those movements (Vietnam) but also hindered them (Algeria).

Now that the USSR is gone the US is still in "containment" mode with anybody that threatens its perceived economic or political interests. So your analysis of the reasons for "containment" seem completely inverted. If anything, the USSR and its nuclear arsenal helped to contain the worst aggression of the colonial powers and the rising USA (e.g. the US didn't nuke China and Vietnam).

I think it's fairly obvious that plants don't promote semi-feudalism; but anyone with a casual knowlegde of plantation agriculture in the Americas knows that such forms of agriculture are both quite profitable and also cause rural underdevelopment and slave-like conditions. The U.S. is full of "individual rights" and you stil find plenty of slave-like conditions among the migrant workers cutting cane in Florida.

Here's an article from the Nation that questions some of Vassiliev's conclusions on the Hiss case

Just think, if it weren't for capitalism and intellectual property rights, there'd be no Homer, no Sophocles, no Aristotle, no Confucius, no Buddha, no Leonardo, no Jesus, .... Oddly, it appears that humans are good at making culture without payment and property rights.

In the ancient world, books were scrolls, which avoided the complexity and expense of bookbinding. With flexible e-paper, I suspect the scroll will return to its rightful place as the preferred format for printed matter, since you'll only need one large scroll to display anything every printed.