Why didn't the Cold War get bloody?

[Anomalocaris]

Cold War never turned hot because the Soviet Union never really caught up to the US both in global military power and economic power.   Mutually assured destruction helped.  But there is deeper reason why both side preferred short term stability.   Even without MAD, the side that in theory would gain by destroying the established order does not see itself strong enough to topple the world order.   Cold War turning hot was less likely.

Why do you then think that America would engage in fighting proxy wars with smaller communist countries, if there was really no need for them to engage in this conflict to, as you put it, 'topple the world order'?

Ideologically the Soviets had a need to topple the world order.  But practically the Soviet Union wasn’t strong enough to do so.  So the Soviets chose the middle way, which was to stoke minor wars that gnaws away at the fringe of the post war order, and prevent countries that just emerged onto the regional scene from joining the order, but without truly confronting the US outside the immediate periphery of the Soviet Union.

Whether there was a need for the US to confront each of these soviet efforts is debatable.  Certainly the US indulged in exaggerating the Soviet threat at times because it usually pays politically in a democratic society to indulge in histrionics about the magnitude of threat and exhibit theatrical resolution in dealing aggressively with them.  Who needs facts when one has “moral clarity” and “right” on one’s side.   There were certainly times when the Americans hardline attitude and aggressive reactions actually unified a communist block by forcing each domestic communist movement that would otherwise have been suspicious of USSR and Russia it to look to the Soviet Union.  Both Cuba and China were examples where the US could have fractured the communist movements and weakened the Soviet hold by embracing native communistic movements that were suspicious of the USSR, but instead chose to adapt a hardline attitude that drive both into the arms of the USSR.