Propaganda was very strong back then. If the public were told Stalin was really the next Hitler/Tojo they'd have agreed to finish the job in Europe.
Uh, no. Americans were not willing to fight the
actual Hitler/Tojo until Pearl Harbor. "Finishing the job" in 1945 meant finishing off the Axis, not (even for the great majority of anti-Communists) starting a new war with "our Soviet ally." Support even for
containing the USSR was rather slow to develop in OTL, in the absence of such an invasion.
Indeed, the pressure in 1945, far from being for a new war, was to demobilize much faster than the US government wanted to do. There were demonstrations to "bring the boy home"--including some by troops themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post–World_War_II_demobilization_strikes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demobilization_of_United_States_armed_forces_after_World_War_II
So far I've been mainly talking about the US but western Europe would be even more violently opposed to the idea. In France the PCF got 26 percent of the vote and was the largest party. In Italy the Communists and Socialists combined got 39 percent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_general_election,_1946 and while not all Socialists shared party leader Nenni's pro-Communist (at the time) views, all of them would be opposed to starting a new war--as would most Christian Democrats and others. With Communists in the governments, controlling the major trade unions (including those involved in military production), with military experience from the Resistance, the US would face a civil war in western Europe if it tried this. As for the UK, Churchill would have to make himself dictator and throw the entire Labour Party in jail to do something like this; and if he didn't invade immediately (which he couldn't do anyway because neither Truman nor any other conceivable US president, even the most anti-Communist ones conceivable would approve) once Attlee gets into power, certainly
he isn't going to do it.
Virtually the only people who said there was a possibility of a new world war started by the Western Allies against the USSR were in fact the Communists. There were some people who were arguing that the US should take a harder line against the USSR but they dismissed as contemptible Communist slander any notion that they favored going to war with the Soviets.
The whole idea is so politically impossible in 1945 that discussions of the military strength of the two sides is almost irrelevant. (Remember that it was not some left-wing magazine but Henry Luce's
Life which in 1943 described the Russians as "one hell of a people" who "look like Americans, dress like Americans, and think like Americans" and described the NKVD as a "national police similar to the FBI" with the job of "tracking down traitors"...
https://books.google.com/books?id=hS37BjbOMmAC&pg=PA219&lpg=PA219)