Was the Cold War a necessary conflict or was the fear of Communism an excuse for the U.S. to become a global superpower?

The US could have been whatever it wanted to be after WWII.  It was going to be a global superpower no matter what.  I do not think that the fear of communism was used as a cover for US imperialism.  After all, we had not needed any such cover earlier when we took places like Hawaii and the Philippines as US possessions.

To me, communism is only benign as we look back in hindsight.  The communist ideology clearly says that revolution is going to occur across the world and many communists thought that the Soviet Union should help bring that about.  The Soviet Union was also very much in a position to harm US allies in Western Europe.

Communism now seems like a harmless thing, but it didn't look that way in 1950, for example, as China became communist, the USSR had the bomb, and North Korea invaded South Korea.