I'm by no means equating the three, but it's ahistorical to present the American military as an idealistic organization that exists to battle evil. Hell, Mao killed more Soviet soldiers than the USA ever did.
In the 20th century we had already gone through a war so terrible it was called the war to end all wars, until 20 years later when we made it look small by comparison. The deaths in WW2 accounted for 3% of the entire population of the world. And we hadn't even invented the atomic bomb until the very end.
After WW2 we were on the precipice of the next war potentially eliminating the human race. I can see why we were reluctant to jump into it all over again by "battling evil" and forcing Russia to give back the territory they took from Germany.
It's just kind of silly to portray the American military as "standing up to Stalin" because Americans are taught Stalin equals evil and America equals good and ipso facto America must have stood up to Stalin.
That is, if you take as a constraint that you don't actually want to start an all-out war, the post-WW2 west stood up to Stalin in probably the best way it possibly could have.
The comment's grandparent could have just as well been defending Western Europe from Stalin's USSR territorial lust. They didn't stop moving west just to be polite.
That vast military stand-off, which became the cold war, was a military conflict. The US deployed over three million soldiers to Europe in the 1950s almost entirely to stop the USSR from advancing any further.