Xi Jinping claimed US wants China to attack Taiwan

The Soviets genuinely thought the West would attack - they believed their own ideology - until Gorbachev.

Part of that ideology was profound State control of everything, which in the case of the USSR ended up with a massively inefficient agricultural sector. Farms were either way too small (personal plots) or way too large (State farms/collectives). Poor production of food was not because of defence spending; it was because of an inherently inefficient agricultural sector.

Over time the USSR produced more and more, although the economic growth rate grew ever slower and was basically zero toward the end (and so the USSR was falling further and further behind the West), and the central planners were not controlling money properly and so people ended up with a lot of money - much more money than things to buy, given the token prices set by the State, plus distribution issues (Moscow first, everywhere else further down the pecking order) - and so chronic shortages became the norm, because everyone had tons of buying power.

The USSR was a solid second-world power, in terms of living standards, but people came to view the whole thing as a failure (especially so as knowledge of how life was in the West spread - remember that it was only after Khrushchev established himself, so late 1950s or so, that people living in the USSR even began to have a clue that life was different, with much higher living standards and much more freedom, elsewhere).

Then Gorbachev came along, and seems not to have understood how the USSR worked (which is to say, on Party orders), and he hammered the economy with reforms (half-way house reforms don't work - you're either centrally controlled or not, and trying to be half centrally controlled is a disaster), weakened the Party (with elections, because the Party was getting in his way), and in the end, it all fell over.