One problem, on both the Capitalist and Communist side, was that what should have been a competition of economics got taken over by military spending.
Is there anyway the Cold War can be fought with consumer goods and whoever has the better standard of living?
No. That's not how the Soviets saw it. It never was. Here's Stalin's speech to the Party in the early 1930s:
"But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her because of her backwardness, military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity. Do you remember the words of the prerevolutionary poet: "You are poor and abundant, mighty and impotent, Mother Russia." Those gentlemen were quite familiar with the verses of the old poet. They beat her, saying: "You are abundant; so one can enrich oneself at your expense. They beat her, saying: "You are poor and impotent '" so you can be beaten and plundered with impunity. Such is the law of the exploiters-to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak-therefore you are wrong; hence, you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty-therefore you are right; hence, we must be wary of you. That is why we must no longer lag behind.
In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, in the hands of the people, we have a fatherland, and we will defend its independence. Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist system of economy. There is no other way. That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution: "Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.
We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed."
http://academic.shu.edu/russianhistory/index.php/Stalin_on_Rapid_Industrialization
To the Soviets, this was no mere philosophical argument. It was a matter of ensuring that the Soviet Union would not be attacked by the West a fourth time in a century. And considering the last invader was bent on full-scale ethnic cleansing, I'd say there's no way to remove that paranoia.
So the Russians will want their buffer states. They will want to keep the boot down on Germany, for fear of it rising up again. They will want to ensure that American bombers are kept as far from their borders as possible. Already the Americans, British, and French have tried to snuff out the Revolution in the cradle at Arkhangelsk. What's to say they won't try again if the Red Army isn't ready?
Not to mention, of course, the ideological commitment of Communism to the worldwide revolution of the proletariat.
This is unacceptable to the United States, which included as one of its World War II aims the opening of the world to free trade.
The Cold War is going to be a military and geopolitical struggle no matter what.
Anyway, as for respect, the only answer is to make it actually more successful than it was IOTL. Prevent food shortages in the Soviet Union. Keep the Gulags quiet. Stalin was an old-fashioned man who viewed them as indispensable to the functioning of the Russian state. How, after all, will strategic metals be efficiently mined if not by the labor of political opponents? Make him a bit more open to reason, and the gulags would be scaled down. Control the Cult of Personality better, to the point where the Soviet Union becomes, in western eyes, a bigger, stronger, more dangerous...Spain? Yugoslavia? Instead of the proto-Juche it became IOTL.