A different view of the Cold War

When my dad was in college he went to Belgium as an exchange student. The college was in the town of Ghent, and the dormitory that my dad stayed in was made up predominantly of third-world graduate students. They shared a communal kitchen, where all the people of different nationalities would cook their food alongside each other. It was a place of intellectual and political discussion. One of the opinions that really stuck with my dad came from a discussion of the Cold War super-powers, the US and USSR. My dad said that the US had the moral high ground in the conflict. However, one of the students responded "When you live in a poor third-world country which is nothing but a pawn in the war for global domination, America's actions on the ground don't look that different from Russia's. They both use everyone and everything they can in their quest to control the world."