In all fairness, most countries do. Watching South American leaders lately shows the exact same behavior. Find a foreign devil for everyone to rally against to hide domestic issues.
Soviets were not some bogeyman. They were real, their spies were real, and the international communist movement they sponsored was real.
Rosenbergs and others did spy for the Soviets. They did successfully transfer secrets related to the atomic bomb. And they were ideologically motivated.
Communist would have been a better word to use than Soviet. Soviet was relatively specific, but broad swaths of the world got labelled communist. While it's true that the Soviets were more than boogeymen, I think that the broader point stands that Americans (and everyone else really) tend to have some convenient, reductionist label to apply to "others" that is broadly taken as a synonym for "evildoer". "Terrorist" is the fashionable label today.
I may be reading you incorrectly, but I get the sense you consider what the US/West does somehow isn't ideologically motivated or that having any such motivations is inherently sinister? Of course they were, just like the US is ideologically motivated. Defending and furthering capitalist goals is no less ideologically motivated than defending and furthering communist goals.
We American's require a boogeyman.
In all fairness, most countries do. Watching South American leaders lately shows the exact same behavior. Find a foreign devil for everyone to rally against to hide domestic issues.