How did the need to rebuild after the war affect the choices made by the us and the soviet union? (us history, the cold war)

The United States sponsored what became known as "The Marshall Plan" (so called after Secretary of State George Marshall).  The official name of the program was the European Recovery Program.  Initially, this support was offered to all nations in Europe needing recovery after the war.  But the Soviet Union denounced the plan as a device to push countries to align with the United States and its "capitalist imperialism." Thus nations that were under Soviet influence withdrew from involvement in the plan. The Western European democracies that were aided by the Marshall Plan received $13 billion in economic aid.  (That would more that $100 billion in today's dollars.)

The Soviet Union sponsored its own plan for the communist bloc nations.  The USSR's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, proposed his own plan to aid states in alliance with the USSR.  The Soviet Union aimed to strengthen its own ties to communist-leaning countries in Europe.  The plan established the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), which was an economic organization of communist states that lasted from 1949 to 1991.

The answer is crop yield.